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Right now, there's teams of people at companies like Spotify and Stitcher, frantic in front of whiteboards, trying to plan a future for podcasts wherein it will

Right now, there's teams of people at companies like Spotify and Stitcher, frantic in front of whiteboards, trying to plan a future for podcasts wherein it will be harder/impossible to skip the ads. First, they have to control the distribution. Then, they have to build the tech, which will obviously involve some kind of DRM. To say that I hope they fail is an understatement. But I know they'll try because in the internet economy, companies simply must fight, kick, and scratch for every last fraction of penny of advertising revenue. I hope that they are unable to wrest sufficient control over the distribution channels to force this ugly future upon us. Indie podcasts will be safe, but the well-produced, mainstream podcasts will go the way of cable TV and it will be gross. Ads ruin everything.

harel 7y ago
A lack of balance is why we can't have nice things. There has to be a middle ground where publishers make money to keep publishing and consumers of those publishing keep consuming the content without being annoyed to the point of wanting to abolish all ads. The result of extremism here is that it wouldn't be viable financially to produce content. Paid subscription models don't seem to work leaving advertising the only revenue stream publishers have. I'm saying all this from a content consumer point of view, not a publishing one.
- na85 7y ago
  The false dichotomy of "ads vs any content at all, whatsoever" plays perfectly into the narrative of the scummy advertising industry. Consumer tastes change. Just as we saw a precipitous drop in smokers from the 1950s to now, we are witnessing a sea change where the human parasites are slowly waking up to the revelation that their business model has a sunset. Consumers are starting to be more vocal and active in their (justified) desire to not be bombarded with advertising everywhere they go.
- throwawawathrow 7y ago
  'What about my business model' is not a valid argument. You are not in fact entitled to one. Personally I'd rather see 95% less 'content' on the Internet if it meant it were ad free. I'd rather have no Facebook than one that serves you personalized ads. I'd rather have no online news media than news websites that serve ads. I'd rather have no television programs than watch programs with commercials. 'Content creators' often overestimate how much people care about their 'content' and they think we couldn't do without them. Well, most of us can. And most of us hate ads. I'm sure, in an ad-free world, that content creators who really care would find a way to make it work. Maybe there'd be less content this way, but so be it. Quality isn't quantity.
  - harel 7y ago
    You do, and that's fine for you. But I rather have a reasonable amount of ads to support content, than have no content at all. I do use Facebook as a means to communicate with a lot of people and catch up with friends and family. I consume content form sites that do have ads. I agree the situation is not balanced at the moment, but cutting out 95% of the internet is not a solution. There has to be a balanced middle ground.
    - throwawawathrow 7y ago
      You're conflating 'no content at all' and 'cutting 95% of the Internet'. Honestly there's so much stuff out there that you wouldn't even notice even if 99.9% of the Internet content were removed overnight. There are always people somewhere willing to create content without serving you ads. This much content, however little (in proportion to the rest) should be enough to satiate anyone's needs. Who needs the rest.
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        Pretty good odds that the content you care about is in that 99.9%, so people would certainly notice except for those with such broad/pop tastes that they are easily satisfied with anything, which seems to be the only people you're talking about.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      Maybe 10% or less of Facebook's current per-user ad viewing time would be enough to sustain a service that allows to keep in touch with people (thanks to economies of scale) but the problem is, once you introduce ads, greed comes along for a ride and that's why we can't have nice things. Since "being reasonable" isn't a thing that ad people understand, I'm happy for their entire shitty industry to die and burn in hell.
      - iamstupidsimple 7y ago
        Not that I'm opposed to it going the way of the dodo, ad free Facebook just isn't viable. The product is shit and nobody would pay for it just like how the majority* would never pay for email. And why should they? They're already paying for their internet bill. *HN users not withstanding
- chappi42 7y ago
  Why do paid subscription models not work? Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal seem to work. Switched to Tidal recently, love the reach incl. ECM label! (If there would be something comparable for newspapers I'd pay too, as is, I ublockorigin (or abstain))
  - harel 7y ago
    They do work, I pay Netflix, Spotify and Prime. But there is a limit. I can't pay every single publisher. Micropayments didn't seem to have taken off, and when I hit paywalls these days I turn away - I don't want a subscription in order to consume one article. I now dread the day where content will be so distributed across publishers and subscriptions, we'd be back at the start in a cable-company style world. I'm not saying ads are good, and no ads are great. I'm saying there has to be a balance. And publishers are best to realise this as well since the more they push, the more people will push back. Maybe (just a passing thought as I'm typing), the ad pricing model should change? Maybe if ads were more expensive and more selective it would offset the revenue by quantity into revenue by quality ad-wise...
    - chappi42 7y ago
      I can't pay every single publisher either. When I occasionally read articles from about 5 newspapers, I couldn't (well, don't want to) subscribe to all of them. Ads are not my main issue, the trackers and the website-bloat are. If I could trust the intermediary I'd voluntarily supply my interests in order to facilitate better ads (but there would need to be a resonably small scope of where this information goes).
      - harel 7y ago
        Trackers are indeed a big part of the problem. I have a feeling that sometime in the near future we'll see a rise of publisher-aggregators. Pay once, to access many. (that's a glove thrown there, in case anyone missed it)
    - cwkoss 7y ago
      Perhaps micropayments haven't taken of because of the ad industry.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Paid subscription models don't work in presence of advertising, because advertising-based models have a huge advantage of being ostensibly free. If we could get rid of the advertising-based models, paid models would become profitable again. (It's like observing that horses don't work for races because motorcycles outpace them. Well, get rid of the motorcycles and horse racing makes sense again.) We can't have nice things because advertising is inherently cancerous in nature. It will grow and repurpose everything it touches until it too serves to feed the advertising machine and depends on it for survival. There's as much balance to be found here as there is with cell growth rates - you want them at the level that supports the functioning of the organism, and not somewhere in the middle between that and the fastest-growing cancer cells.
  - Xelbair 7y ago
    What's even worse is that customers that are actually paying for the service are the best target for ads. They pay premium for access to those.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
The problem is us. We don't pay. We spend ridiculous amounts on nice cars, vacations, fancy clothes, but everything else gets scraps. 50 dollar for a book? Ha! 9,99 max and that's pushing it. 100 dollar to get access to a podcast with 200 hours of quality content that may change your life. Ha! 19,99 if I'm having a good day. 100-300 dollar a month for quality TV? Ha!! I'll pay 10 and then watch BS commercials all fucking day.
dirtyid 7y ago
I'm waiting for a podcast app with crowd sourced timestamp like sound cloud for people to mark ads. Alternatively for injected ads, it would be somewhat trivial to run the same podcast episode downloaded in different regions through transcription services and clip over the difference. Or build fingerprints of similar sounding clips from different podcasts to single out ads. I suppose you'll also have people manually clipping out ads once podcast piracy becomes more prevalent as shows become platform exclusives. There was a post about NPR raking in ad dollars yesterday, and I've heard in passing that their research team have evaluated DRM before.
seqizz 7y ago
Could it be.. Native advertising for songs? /s
nyolfen 7y ago
i will never listen to a podcast on spotify, stitcher et al for exactly this reason.
nickjj 7y ago
> trying to plan a future for podcasts wherein it will be harder/impossible to skip the ads. Aren't most podcasts selling flat rate slots to run ads? Example: Company A gives podcast author $X amount of dollars to run a 30-60 second ad in their 1 hour podcast. If all 10,000 listeners don't listen to the ad then the podcast author still gets the same amount of ad revenue. My thought process on that is, if I begin to hear an ad on a podcast and it's for something I didn't plan to buy anyways, then I will skip the ad by fast forwarding within 3 seconds. But if a solution existed where I couldn't do that then I wouldn't end up making the purchase by listening to the ad. I'd probably switch the podcast off for something else until the ad played out and that comes with the risk of me not going back to the podcast because I found something more interesting.
- ilogik 7y ago
  If nobody buys the product, the Company won't buy ads again from that podcast
- efdee 7y ago
  If nobody listens to the ad, how much more episodes will the advertiser be willing to pay for?
  - nickjj 7y ago
    None, but the people who skip the ads manually now are not going to buy the ad's product if they can't skip the ad. They were non-buyers in either case. Ad skippers are generally a different type of person who won't be convinced to buy something just because they were forced to listen to it. They will however buy something on their own terms and some of them also like to show support for the things they listen to or watch by donating directly to the content provider (I do this a lot with music).
    - efdee 7y ago
      People who skip ads are, in general, just as susceptible to them as most other people. So yes, if they are forced to listen to it, they will, in general, buy more of these products. Advertising works because it is psychology. Nothing rational about it.
neumann 7y ago
currently Malcolm Gladwell is doing sponsorship for Revisionist History by splicing episodes with mini 30-60sec advertorials in which he interviews AT&T Chief Marketing Officer about the awesomeness of AT&T's 5G. It's genius, because it comes across as - informative - non-spammy and with the typical easy to digest Gladwellian narration. What's egregious about it to my taste is that much like Gladwell's podcasts, it suggests to the audience that is simply the facts and totally fair, while all the questions are very much, "Is AT&T's 5G offering fantastic or awesome? And how long before I can use it?" For someone literate in the topic it goes beyond the normal "don't let facts get in the way of a good story" that most podcasting falls into and you can hear the AT&T ad guys writing the script. But for the average listener it is just smooth, easy listening that draws you in without you realizing it is paid advertising attempting to win you over for a financial goal.
- dirtyid 7y ago
  Native ad reads can be fun and deceptive. Linus Tech Tips WAN Show has the courtesy of including timestamps that allows you to skip past ads or at minimum, identify which segments are clearly delineated as ads. I don't suppose most content producers will volunteer that information and have it marked on the seekbar or some other clear UI element to indicate when advertisement is playing. Isn't that a legal requirement for videos even on youtube? Podcast gets away with it by dumping a sponsorship disclaimer in the show info metadata.

harel 7y ago

A lack of balance is why we can't have nice things. There has to be a middle ground where publishers make money to keep publishing and consumers of those publishing keep consuming the content without being annoyed to the point of wanting to abolish all ads. The result of extremism here is that it wouldn't be viable financially to produce content. Paid subscription models don't seem to work leaving advertising the only revenue stream publishers have. I'm saying all this from a content consumer point of view, not a publishing one.

na85 7y ago
The false dichotomy of "ads vs any content at all, whatsoever" plays perfectly into the narrative of the scummy advertising industry. Consumer tastes change. Just as we saw a precipitous drop in smokers from the 1950s to now, we are witnessing a sea change where the human parasites are slowly waking up to the revelation that their business model has a sunset. Consumers are starting to be more vocal and active in their (justified) desire to not be bombarded with advertising everywhere they go.
throwawawathrow 7y ago
'What about my business model' is not a valid argument. You are not in fact entitled to one. Personally I'd rather see 95% less 'content' on the Internet if it meant it were ad free. I'd rather have no Facebook than one that serves you personalized ads. I'd rather have no online news media than news websites that serve ads. I'd rather have no television programs than watch programs with commercials. 'Content creators' often overestimate how much people care about their 'content' and they think we couldn't do without them. Well, most of us can. And most of us hate ads. I'm sure, in an ad-free world, that content creators who really care would find a way to make it work. Maybe there'd be less content this way, but so be it. Quality isn't quantity.
- harel 7y ago
  You do, and that's fine for you. But I rather have a reasonable amount of ads to support content, than have no content at all. I do use Facebook as a means to communicate with a lot of people and catch up with friends and family. I consume content form sites that do have ads. I agree the situation is not balanced at the moment, but cutting out 95% of the internet is not a solution. There has to be a balanced middle ground.
  - throwawawathrow 7y ago
    You're conflating 'no content at all' and 'cutting 95% of the Internet'. Honestly there's so much stuff out there that you wouldn't even notice even if 99.9% of the Internet content were removed overnight. There are always people somewhere willing to create content without serving you ads. This much content, however little (in proportion to the rest) should be enough to satiate anyone's needs. Who needs the rest.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Pretty good odds that the content you care about is in that 99.9%, so people would certainly notice except for those with such broad/pop tastes that they are easily satisfied with anything, which seems to be the only people you're talking about.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Maybe 10% or less of Facebook's current per-user ad viewing time would be enough to sustain a service that allows to keep in touch with people (thanks to economies of scale) but the problem is, once you introduce ads, greed comes along for a ride and that's why we can't have nice things. Since "being reasonable" isn't a thing that ad people understand, I'm happy for their entire shitty industry to die and burn in hell.
    - iamstupidsimple 7y ago
      Not that I'm opposed to it going the way of the dodo, ad free Facebook just isn't viable. The product is shit and nobody would pay for it just like how the majority* would never pay for email. And why should they? They're already paying for their internet bill. *HN users not withstanding
chappi42 7y ago
Why do paid subscription models not work? Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal seem to work. Switched to Tidal recently, love the reach incl. ECM label! (If there would be something comparable for newspapers I'd pay too, as is, I ublockorigin (or abstain))
- harel 7y ago
  They do work, I pay Netflix, Spotify and Prime. But there is a limit. I can't pay every single publisher. Micropayments didn't seem to have taken off, and when I hit paywalls these days I turn away - I don't want a subscription in order to consume one article. I now dread the day where content will be so distributed across publishers and subscriptions, we'd be back at the start in a cable-company style world. I'm not saying ads are good, and no ads are great. I'm saying there has to be a balance. And publishers are best to realise this as well since the more they push, the more people will push back. Maybe (just a passing thought as I'm typing), the ad pricing model should change? Maybe if ads were more expensive and more selective it would offset the revenue by quantity into revenue by quality ad-wise...
  - chappi42 7y ago
    I can't pay every single publisher either. When I occasionally read articles from about 5 newspapers, I couldn't (well, don't want to) subscribe to all of them. Ads are not my main issue, the trackers and the website-bloat are. If I could trust the intermediary I'd voluntarily supply my interests in order to facilitate better ads (but there would need to be a resonably small scope of where this information goes).
    - harel 7y ago
      Trackers are indeed a big part of the problem. I have a feeling that sometime in the near future we'll see a rise of publisher-aggregators. Pay once, to access many. (that's a glove thrown there, in case anyone missed it)
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    Perhaps micropayments haven't taken of because of the ad industry.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Paid subscription models don't work in presence of advertising, because advertising-based models have a huge advantage of being ostensibly free. If we could get rid of the advertising-based models, paid models would become profitable again. (It's like observing that horses don't work for races because motorcycles outpace them. Well, get rid of the motorcycles and horse racing makes sense again.) We can't have nice things because advertising is inherently cancerous in nature. It will grow and repurpose everything it touches until it too serves to feed the advertising machine and depends on it for survival. There's as much balance to be found here as there is with cell growth rates - you want them at the level that supports the functioning of the organism, and not somewhere in the middle between that and the fastest-growing cancer cells.
- Xelbair 7y ago
  What's even worse is that customers that are actually paying for the service are the best target for ads. They pay premium for access to those.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago

The problem is us. We don't pay. We spend ridiculous amounts on nice cars, vacations, fancy clothes, but everything else gets scraps. 50 dollar for a book? Ha! 9,99 max and that's pushing it. 100 dollar to get access to a podcast with 200 hours of quality content that may change your life. Ha! 19,99 if I'm having a good day. 100-300 dollar a month for quality TV? Ha!! I'll pay 10 and then watch BS commercials all fucking day.

dirtyid 7y ago

I'm waiting for a podcast app with crowd sourced timestamp like sound cloud for people to mark ads. Alternatively for injected ads, it would be somewhat trivial to run the same podcast episode downloaded in different regions through transcription services and clip over the difference. Or build fingerprints of similar sounding clips from different podcasts to single out ads. I suppose you'll also have people manually clipping out ads once podcast piracy becomes more prevalent as shows become platform exclusives. There was a post about NPR raking in ad dollars yesterday, and I've heard in passing that their research team have evaluated DRM before.

seqizz 7y ago

Could it be.. Native advertising for songs? /s

nyolfen 7y ago

i will never listen to a podcast on spotify, stitcher et al for exactly this reason.

nickjj 7y ago

> trying to plan a future for podcasts wherein it will be harder/impossible to skip the ads. Aren't most podcasts selling flat rate slots to run ads? Example: Company A gives podcast author $X amount of dollars to run a 30-60 second ad in their 1 hour podcast. If all 10,000 listeners don't listen to the ad then the podcast author still gets the same amount of ad revenue. My thought process on that is, if I begin to hear an ad on a podcast and it's for something I didn't plan to buy anyways, then I will skip the ad by fast forwarding within 3 seconds. But if a solution existed where I couldn't do that then I wouldn't end up making the purchase by listening to the ad. I'd probably switch the podcast off for something else until the ad played out and that comes with the risk of me not going back to the podcast because I found something more interesting.

ilogik 7y ago
If nobody buys the product, the Company won't buy ads again from that podcast
efdee 7y ago
If nobody listens to the ad, how much more episodes will the advertiser be willing to pay for?
- nickjj 7y ago
  None, but the people who skip the ads manually now are not going to buy the ad's product if they can't skip the ad. They were non-buyers in either case. Ad skippers are generally a different type of person who won't be convinced to buy something just because they were forced to listen to it. They will however buy something on their own terms and some of them also like to show support for the things they listen to or watch by donating directly to the content provider (I do this a lot with music).
  - efdee 7y ago
    People who skip ads are, in general, just as susceptible to them as most other people. So yes, if they are forced to listen to it, they will, in general, buy more of these products. Advertising works because it is psychology. Nothing rational about it.

neumann 7y ago

currently Malcolm Gladwell is doing sponsorship for Revisionist History by splicing episodes with mini 30-60sec advertorials in which he interviews AT&T Chief Marketing Officer about the awesomeness of AT&T's 5G. It's genius, because it comes across as - informative - non-spammy and with the typical easy to digest Gladwellian narration. What's egregious about it to my taste is that much like Gladwell's podcasts, it suggests to the audience that is simply the facts and totally fair, while all the questions are very much, "Is AT&T's 5G offering fantastic or awesome? And how long before I can use it?" For someone literate in the topic it goes beyond the normal "don't let facts get in the way of a good story" that most podcasting falls into and you can hear the AT&T ad guys writing the script. But for the average listener it is just smooth, easy listening that draws you in without you realizing it is paid advertising attempting to win you over for a financial goal.

dirtyid 7y ago
Native ad reads can be fun and deceptive. Linus Tech Tips WAN Show has the courtesy of including timestamps that allows you to skip past ads or at minimum, identify which segments are clearly delineated as ads. I don't suppose most content producers will volunteer that information and have it marked on the seekbar or some other clear UI element to indicate when advertisement is playing. Isn't that a legal requirement for videos even on youtube? Podcast gets away with it by dumping a sponsorship disclaimer in the show info metadata.