If/when other companies switch to this strategy, they’ll all be competing for less inventory and cost will go up accordingly.
The issue I'm seeing is that there are many orders or magnitude more potential content providers out there than people are willing to manually validate and white-list.
This might lead us to a situation where only the largest content providers/creators still get access to ad money which in turn will make it impossible for creators targeting a more niche audience to still have a chance in the market.
Case in point: lately I'm totally into science videos on YouTube. From the more mainstream "Space Time" to the now-not-as-niche-as-in-2012 "Cody's Lab".
While the latter doesn't share the former's production values nor budget, it's YouTube ad revenue that allows both to exist and to me personally, both provide equal value.
It concerns me that in the future, if this trend continues, only one of the two will have a chance to survive.
Niche creators do stand a chance. They just need the opportunity to reach their audience with a degree of intimacy and trust that the horrific scourge of mainstream online video and corporate 'journalism' do not and cannot offer. Certain media can enable this for their viewers and others less so. It's no cliche to say that medium is the message in this context.
Native advertising in podcasting is proof that not all online advertising has to consist of bludgeoning ignoramuses over the head with colorful nonsense within the infinite scroll of their Facebook feed. It can be about legitimate respect for a brand and a brand's legitimate respect for it's engaged, targeted niche demographic. But at the current rate of things, the web will require another massive spree of innovation to fix the tragedies caused by Facebook and Google over the past 10+ years to ever reach this point.
It doesn't even need to be particularly native advertising. I've listened to a bunch of ads on Dan Carlin's Hardcore History that are completely unrelated to the subject of the podcast.
Also, the comment I was responding to was using YouTube ads as an example, which are temporally inserted, very similar to podcast and radio ads.
When media consumption demands true engagement of both time and attention, the ad quality improves. Even the best niche digital video content on YouTube is too low-brow to offer a comparable experience to viewers. Again - the medium is the message.
It reminds me a lot of the spots that the local sports radio station uses
Also, I think you need to change your perspective. Ads allowed these niche channels to exist, but these niche channels might not be providing value to the ad networks proportional to their cost. In essence: they're riding the gravy train. They're an inefficiency in the system.
They should work toward becoming valuable, or they should seek alternative forms of funding. Maybe people like you just need to be more open to the value-for-value model. If you like what they are doing, pay them for it.
If you watch an ad on their show but don't interact or otherwise act on it, you're part of the problem. Its like complaining about traffic while you're in your car on the freeway.