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?
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I don’t listen to podcasts but to answer this question
But since I am paying for Spotify I am expecting not to have to listen to any ads.
Companies are forced to increase revenue every year. It means the amount of crap will just keep on increasing.
Ong, first they eliminate the competition and then they start going for profit, which always goes hand in hand with enshitification, for the very simple reason that if there was something they could add to increase profits and user satisfaction at the same time, they would’ve already added it.
They are not trying to make the app work for the user but against him, to take his data, privacy, attention, money etc.
Oh absolutely. I understand that. But is Spotify even the one who is adding/profiting from the ads? I seems like this is coming from someone else since the ads are also on AntennaPod
Corporations need to make profit somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year or two Spotify would introduce payed plan with ads.
The ads are put in by whoever makes the podcast.
Sure they decide that the ad should exist, but how? When I see a mid-roll ad on YouTube for example it was put there by the person who uploaded the video but the content of the ad is delivered by youtube. Who is delivering the content of these ads?
The podcast company that makes the podcast.
When they make it, they put in an <advertising tag> in the locations during the podcast they want the advertising to be, then they sell the advertising space. If there is no local advert, it skips, if there is one, it pulls and plays that.
Blaming Spotify for this is like blaming the company that made your TV for showing you ads that are part of the broadcast. Unless Spotify makes the specific podcast you’re listening to, they’re just playing you the content someone else made, including the ads they included in that content.
This doesn’t affect non-profit companies, who legally cannot have anyone who takes profits away from the company.
For profit companies should be illegal
“Forced”
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.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
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.
copy paste from another comment under this post:
Megaphone (formerly Panoply Media) is a Software as a service (SaaS) business owned by Spotify. The company provides software for podcast hosting and monetization as well as an ad network to generate additional revenue for podcast publishers.
apparently they host their own content under a different name
Podcasts are distributed via RSS (example). Spotify is probably just a frontend for that.
yeah, a few weeks ago I first heard a random US insurance ad or some crap like that, in English, when listening to a podcast from a different country. It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on.
We need Sponsorblock for podcasts
Yep.
In the mean time, on my phone at least, holding volume up makes it skip 30 seconds. Good if phone is with you at the time.
How do you turn that off? Its so fucking frustrating when I’m really digging what I’m listening to, so crank up the volume – only to have it skip to the next track!!
Ive searched the app settings and can’t find how to disable this. Its maddening!
On my Motorola…
Search in settings…
Omg thank you. On Lineage, its under Buttons -> Volume Buttons -> Control Playback
I guess I’m used to mashing volume up if I like what I’m hearing. If you’re used to holding the button down instead then yeah it would be annoying.
Problem is that we don’t know how long the ads take, we need to look how sponsor block will handle youtube new ads
IME ad times are pretty consistent by podcast feed when they’re artificially inserted like that.
When we’re talking product promotions during the podcast recording, they’re only consistent for a given episode, but that’s what sponsorblock is for.
i hit the skip button like 8 times and listen for the podcast, if i hear it i back up once until i hear the end of the ads.
You could also add telemetry. If >50% of your users all skip in the same spot, its an ad break
Well, someone could. I’m just some schlub listening to podcasts.
damn, 8 times? Are your ads too long or is your skip too short?
the skip is 15 seconds and theres usually 2-3 adds on the ad breaks
ah my skip is 30s and I’ve only seen 2 ads in a row, max
IIRC they mentioned is next to impossible without actually processing the video and guessing when then ad stops on your client (since the ads will change per user, so it can’t be done on a server for all users)
video controls change when an ad is playing on YT, which would be a pretty reliable indicator for an extension running at the client side. But that’s more a UBO issue than sponsorblock when it comes to YouTube, as I’m not sure sponsorblock could do anything if the controls are frozen.
Podcasts partner up with ad providers. They inject ads into the episodes depending on several factors, including your location. The podcast has some say and can for example exclude some topics like politics. That catches most, but an ad can also be misrepresented and slip through.
I use Antennapod as well and they have nothing to do with it. They just download episodes from RSS feeds provided from other services.
You could use a VPN server in a smaller country. If the ad market is very small, there simply might be no ads to serve you.
I can also recommend using a swiss VPN server. The funny swiss dialect makes it hilarious.
They have a github thread for it https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/4159
Thanks, that’s good to know! Although this seems to be more related to sponsors. Like the podcast host doing an ad-read. I don’t mind them as much because then at least the creators of the podcast are getting all the money and the ad is not tracking me to figure out what ad to serve me. What I am referring to is more like a regular ad that you would hear on the radio that has been stitched on to the beginning of the episode.
I thought it’s applied to both
I guess so, but sponsors are easier to skip since that are always the same length. If the ad changes length you cant use the time stamps to skip it automatically
Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.
I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.
I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.
I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.
I am developing a podcast app and I can’t prevent it either
Why isn’t there ad blockers for podcast apps, like LibreTube does for YouTube?
The ads can be variable length and tailored to whoever is downloading the podcast. SponsorBlock for podcasts does indeed need to be a thing (but it may be tricky to implement and easily to subverted).
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
I listen to quite a few different podcasts via AntennaPod and have never listened to an ad that wasn’t from the podcast itself. Maybe it’s due to my DNS settings or luck of the draw?
As far as I can tell it depends on the podcast. Some have ads in every episode and some never have any
I just started listening to Ostium recently and one of the episodes was around 20 minutes long, but the first 11 were commercials. It was infuriating.
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 hope some day AI will be incorporated into a podcast player to be able to know the difference between an add and the podcast and automatically skip all adds. Finally, there would be a good use for AI :)
I don’t think you need AI for this problem
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.
No that’s not it. As I mentioned in the post, these ads change based on my location. They are absolutely not added by the people making the podcast because they are not even in the same language as the rest of the podcast.
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