Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesBaxter | Hacker News Reader

I understand that a huge percentage of podcast listeners are based in the US but the number of hours I've spent listening to completely irrelevant adverts is insane.

Surely someone can make a service that takes a podcast feed and packages it with different adverts for different markets and then creates new feeds.

I'd make it but the scaling sales end is not something I know how to do.

I suppose it depends how Apple interprets the feed as I assume Apple devices are the most used for podcast consumption.

View on HN

The major problem is that you can't control the behavior of a podcast client. Some of them will cache you media files "forever", unless you explicitly change the guid. But changing the guid has negative effects on some clients too, as they will re-download the episode because they will see it as new, thus creating duplicate entries.

This is the reason why you just cannot create dynamic ads if you want to stick to the standard RSS+client approach (like iTunes).

Some of the podcasters have started actually building their own native apps to have better control of the content they emit, but it comes with reduced visibility. This is why most of podcasters still release their stuff through iTunes, but invite the listeners to download their app.

What if you dynamically updated the same mp3 file instead of updating the media file URL (and changing the guid.)

As far as cached mp3s that are already downloaded, I don't see why that should have a huge impact on ads. The most important episode for advertising purposes is probably the most recent episode, and if someone pulls an archived mp3 that should have the new ads too. As for already-downloaded, cached mp3s you just gotta let those go.

I like the idea.

I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying. You can't ignore them by looking away like you would on a screen.

Maybe we need an adblock for podcasts (even if it will be difficult to automize -> some manual stripping of the parts where they are promoting stuff)

> even if it will be difficult to automize

Crowdsourcing? See if a lot of people skip over certain fragments of an episode and mark it as "advertisement". Granted, this requires some level of cooperation from podcast player applications.

Yes, please! Let's make bootstrapping and indie projects as hard as possible by placing advertising control solely in the hands of large corporations that have means and resources to fight adblocking.

> I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying.

Really? Most podcast apps replace the skip buttons with "jump forward/back 15/30 sec". Hitting a button twice is too much effort in exchange for getting content for free?

Yes I could FF through ads. The point (for me) is that I can leave my phone in my pocket and use two hands to do something, or keep them in my pockets when trudging home through snow. Which adds to the aggravation of ads - put stuff down, fish phone out of pocket, turn on phone, FF, stash phone. Or listen to the ad.

Thanks, but no sale.

We currently don't have the technology to automatically transcribe podcasts into text (good for the SEO on your podcast site) - But even if we did, how would it know that something is an advert as opposed to part of the show? Most of the podcasts I listen to have ads and in many cases the ads aren't just at the start or end, they're either a live read during the podcast or a cutaway somewhere towards the middle.

Maybe you're just not the target market for ad-funded podcasts.

Cut any segment of 10 seconds or more that is found in more than one podcast episode. (I think this is feasible considering Shazam)

It would remove pre-recorded/repeated ads in the middle (assuming that's what cutaway means), but wouldn't be able to remove live reads. It would also remove intros/exits.

That actually does sound feasible. I'm not sure how feasible when it comes to mobile devices but definitely possible if things like YouTube's ContentID can work

As I understand it, ContentID is notoriously over-aggressive in matching and only "works" in the sense that YouTube's interest in having it isn't particularly harmed by that, since its mostly a tool to improve relations and avoid lawsuits from big media interests.

Without manual validation, it probably wouldn't be a good model for identifying and removing ads from podcasts, especially using a "repeated in multiple podcasts" model, which doesn't start with known ads.

I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying.

Get headphones with forward/back buttons on them. As soon as the ads start it's one or two quick taps on a button by my neck and I'm back to the podcast.

I considered trying to start a service that hosted Ad-less podcasts. I figured I would get sued immediately.

I just skip the first 2-5 minutes of most podcasts and the last 1-3 minutes and pray they don't have ads in the middle.

You dont own the podcast material, and you'd be taking away revenue from the owners. Not a suggested idea.

I've personally thought about a paid platform where users subscribe to the podcasts they like best and get the perk of avoiding ads since they're contributing to the podcasts creators

Out of curiosity, what podcasts do you listen to that have ads? I listen to a couple hours of podcasts every day for a couple years now and have never heard one (beyond the podcast itself asking for patreon support).

I don't think I've heard many podcasts with actual radio-style ad breaks, but there are plenty with sponsors (e.g. TWiT, DevChat.tv, Spec.fm, Jupiter Broadcasting -- except for Tech Talk Today and Unfilter which are Patreon-supported).

Luckily with the podcasts I'm subscribed to most of the sponsors tend to be relevant to the actual shows. The only irrelevant sponsor I recall is Ting (a Canada-based US mobile provider I think).

I have had the opposite experience, all but two of the podcasts I listen to have adverts. The ones I listen to are from the bigger podcasting studios (Smodcast, PodcastOne, etc). One of the two is Patreon funded and the other is more a bonus content on top of a much larger network of entertainment.

A lot of the tech podcasts I listen to - e.g., Arrested Devops, Talk Python to Me, Software Engineering Daily, Re/Code Decode - have fairly prominent adverts. Sometime read out by the presenter themselves, other times presented as a piece of pre-recorded audio. In the former cases, they'll sometimes do their best to make reference to the content of the podcast in the advertising message.

I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio, they're not that annoying and usually relevant to the podcast subject matter. If they started playing multiple irrelevant adverts back to back, with accompanying audio compression, then I'd be upset about it.

I'm the other way around. I immediately lose trust in a host as soon as they start reading an ad - it shows that the production doesn't have a strict separation of content and sales.

Interesting, I wonder how much of this is an artifact of podcasts oriented more towards a hobbyist audience vs. a professional audience?

Podcasts aren't expensive to produce at a basic level, it's mostly just the hosts sitting around and chatting on skype for an hour every week or two. I'm only aware of one podcast I listen to that frequently asks for contributions, and that's mostly because the hosts have found they work best when they're physically co-present and have to fly one of the hosts out every month to record a bunch of shows all at once.

> I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio

Yeah, I agree. When the parent discussed adverts before I was thinking of the more commercial radio type. I think it's an effort to try to monetize podcast audiences, but at least for me I'm able to find more content than I can listen to, run by hosts that aren't all that interested in turning their hobby into a money making venture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com