Privacy

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Why do podcasts have preroll ads now? (self.privacy)

submitted 1 month ago by cralder to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

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

[–] cralder 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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