I like podcasts, and think we're in something of a golden age for them right now. However, the "sponsorship" model (a very few advertisers paying content creat

I like podcasts, and think we're in something of a golden age for them right now. However, the "sponsorship" model (a very few advertisers paying content creators to--usually manually--include mention of them in their content) is much more concerning to me than the "black box ad auction" model (content creators get money from an advertising aggregator like Google for putting a box on their page). There's a spectrum there, to be sure, but with sponsorship it's much easier for advertisers to explicitly or implicitly influence the content creators outside of the "this podcast funded by FooBarCorp!" segments. Even without strong-arming creators, the knowledge of sponsorship can have a chilling effect on some content (i.e. it's just tawdry to start a segment about military drones being bad and then have to state that Lockheed Martin is your sponsor). This can have two outcomes, neither of them good. Option one is that content creators can spend a lot of time trying to select/vet/court sponsors that align with their interests. This is the NPR model, and even they have trouble getting it right. Smaller creators may not have the time or ability to emulate it. Option two is content that drifts into the realm of affiliate marketing as sponsors exert more influence over creators. Neither of those have happened yet because the market is not yet saturated, I suspect. I'd prefer black-box auctioned ads over that any day, even with the drawbacks of that system (ad aggregator influence, pervasive tracking, content delivery engineered for metrics collection, potential for sketchy ads to run on your site).