I don’t know when this started but I noticed it for the first time a few months ago. Some podcasts will have preroll ads that are obviously tailored to me since they are not in the same language as the podcast, instead they are in my native language and if I connect to a VPN in another country the ad will change to one from that country. They also seem to appear regardless of podcast app. I have used both AntennaPod and Spotify. AntennaPod is free so I guess they source their podcasts from some third party website that could be adding in the ads. But since I am paying for Spotify I am expecting not to have to listen to any ads. So who is adding in these ads? Can I get rid of them or am I just stuck with them?
It is very hard to maintain the profitability of a podcast. To get around adblockers, many podcasters have taken to editing the ads into the podcast before the podcast is uploaded to any platform. I suspect this may be the case for some of the instances you mention. These ads are not added by Spotify or any third party. The podcaster either does a sponsored ad-read or receives the audio/video for the ad from a sponsor and adds it to the podcast in post. Not much you can do at that point other than watch the cast on YouTube and use SponsorBlock.
I think it’s up to the people who make the podcast. A lot of them let you pay to get a link to the version without ads
My guess as to the “why” is that it’s just another example of enshittification. Podcasts were essentially a bubble that everyone was trying to get in on, but the amount of low quality (not just production but also content) flooding the market devalued it significantly and listeners and subscriptions began declining. Everyone is trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of it now, which means there are even more ads on top of all the ads and cross-promotion that come baked into an episode.
I always ditch a podcast the second i hear an ad or something that resembles paid sponsored content. Fuck that, I’ll pay them if I find the quality worth it, ads are cancer.
It has nothing to do with AntennaPod, it just downloads the file from the server and the server looks at your IP address and just chooses what add to put at the beginning of the file.
I get that. But is Spotify using the same third party server then? Because the ads are always the same regardless of platform
Yes, most podcasts are hosted outside of your podcast player and distributed via RSS (even if this is Spotify which already hosts music).
So when a service has the podcast it means it lists the response from the RSS feed, but usually they just copy the text data, including the URL where the actual audio is stored.
This audio is served by whatever other service the creator of the podcast uses, which means you’re a free user to that service even if you pay for Spotify, which means the wonderful benefit of ads.
And these are ads you can’t block since they’re included in the audio stream (yay! /s).
Podverse (the player I use) mentions this as an issue when creating clips of the podcasts because they can’t know how much the timestamp has been offset by those ads, so your clip probably only sounds good to you.
Thank you for the explanation. Kinda sucks that a premium service like Spotify doesn’t even host their own content, but that’s capitalism I guess.
I mean, usually when I download podcasts there’s just 5 or so ads that get injected over-and-over. I don’t think it would be too complicated to have some software recognizes the length of an ad, and that it occurs >2x in a file, and then just mark that section as “ad” and auto skip over it
