Anecdata from my own (fairly extensive) podcast subscriptions: - Pods that have long been advertising-free now carry ads. Notably Douglas Rushkoff's Team Huma

Anecdata from my own (fairly extensive) podcast subscriptions: - Pods that have long been advertising-free now carry ads. Notably Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human and Stephen West's Philosophize This. As someone with an extreme aversion to advertising, this is highly disappointing in both cases. It also means that I'll only listen where I can skip forward through ad spots. - Pods that have carried ads ... seem to both be highly inconsistent in the length of pre- and post-roll spots (15 seconds? 20? 30? 60? 120 seconds? Make up your damned minds). Increasingly I'll set a long intro skip and seek back in smaller increments to find the session start. - Pods that have carried ads ... seem to have increasingly prevalent skipped spots. "We'll be back after a break" often has ... no break. I'm seeing this across numerous podcasts and publishers, and the practice seems to be increasing. I'm only suspecting that both general podcasting economics and advertising markets are less favourable. Also: Least. Favourite. Ad. Insert. Evar.: the cold break in the middle of a sentence to an ad spot. This shows up increasingly on a few otherwise much-liked podcasts, and is immensely frustrating. Given I'm not going to listen to ads already, the more intrusive and annoying they are, the less likely I am to listen to, and rate/review/recommend a given podcast. Yes, I really wish there were alternative support models that were widely viable. Academically-sponsored podcasts (The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps), or those with short voiced promos (part but not all of David Runciman's Podcast Universe ad inventory) are hugely preferable to pre-recorded spots, which are an instant turn-off. I'll listen to (and even mention in HN comments) Runciman's promos for the London Review of Books, which is an increasingly relevant and refreshing island of sane contemplation in a rapidly deteriorating Web. But other third-party spots ... just ... no. Gwern had a fascinating study for textual online content that showed advertising cut exposure by about 14%. I suspect there's a similar dynamic in podcasts. See: <https://gwern.net/ad https://gwern.net/ad>