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That's a fair point. Whatever service is originally hosting the content might well be doing the dynamic ad insertions too. My assumption is that in at least som

That's a fair point. Whatever service is originally hosting the content might well be doing the dynamic ad insertions too. My assumption is that in at least some cases while the ads are desired by the podcaster, they aren't inserted until a later stage by an aggregator. So there's some hope of getting at the original source. At least, when I've been able to track down sources, they seem to be mostly hosted on generic CDNs, which gives me some hope that the same file is being served to all listeners.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
That’s generally the case — and depending on the hosting system, that could change too. The really huge companies in the space (Art19, Stitcher/Midroll, Wondery, Megaphone, Podbean) are all doing dynamic ad insertion on different scales — but given the way the RSS feeds are constructed, I don’t know specifically how the dynamic aspect works for each provider. I do know that early on, companies who did this stuff (like NPR, who was really early to this game and has been doing some type of dynamic ad-insertion for more than a decade) often had separate versions of the audio file. So you could have an ad-free version of the file (maybe for users in certain geographic regions, if an ad-buy was specifically targeted) and then other versions of the file with ads built-in — and an algorithm would determine what version a user accessed based on a variety of parameters. If that’s the case, yeah, you would probably be able to figure out if multiple versions existed and then request the ad-free version from CDN or whatever. At this point, it’s my understanding that most of the dynamic insertion is happening server-side — where ads are inserted based on campaign timing and maybe geo-targeting) at the point of the download or stream request (though I imagine even here, most of what is served is coming from a CDN, I just mean the initial request). That way, the download/stream always has “current” ads, even if the show itself is years old. (I don’t know how often they update those different versions — I would imagine you have 6-week campaign as an example where all episodes get an insert and are then cached on the CDN and then after the campaign ends a new file is generated and cached). That isn’t to say you couldn’t potentially still get access to a copy of a file without inserts — but I bet it would be a lot more difficult.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

That’s generally the case — and depending on the hosting system, that could change too. The really huge companies in the space (Art19, Stitcher/Midroll, Wondery, Megaphone, Podbean) are all doing dynamic ad insertion on different scales — but given the way the RSS feeds are constructed, I don’t know specifically how the dynamic aspect works for each provider. I do know that early on, companies who did this stuff (like NPR, who was really early to this game and has been doing some type of dynamic ad-insertion for more than a decade) often had separate versions of the audio file. So you could have an ad-free version of the file (maybe for users in certain geographic regions, if an ad-buy was specifically targeted) and then other versions of the file with ads built-in — and an algorithm would determine what version a user accessed based on a variety of parameters. If that’s the case, yeah, you would probably be able to figure out if multiple versions existed and then request the ad-free version from CDN or whatever. At this point, it’s my understanding that most of the dynamic insertion is happening server-side — where ads are inserted based on campaign timing and maybe geo-targeting) at the point of the download or stream request (though I imagine even here, most of what is served is coming from a CDN, I just mean the initial request). That way, the download/stream always has “current” ads, even if the show itself is years old. (I don’t know how often they update those different versions — I would imagine you have 6-week campaign as an example where all episodes get an insert and are then cached on the CDN and then after the campaign ends a new file is generated and cached). That isn’t to say you couldn’t potentially still get access to a copy of a file without inserts — but I bet it would be a lot more difficult.