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Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

If spotify gets a few exclusives from e.g. gimlet, that might drive listeners there, which might make such exclusives cheaper to get.

I really hope this fails though. One of the great things about podcasts is the open RSS based ecosystem. I think current listeners might be reluctant to move away from that. What scares me is that new listeners could come to spotify and not realize it is weird for podcasts.

The only real issue RSS has is that ads have to be baked in. Sadly I don't know if we could have an open system with personalized ads.

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> The only real issue RSS has is that ads have to be baked in. Sadly I don't know if we could have an open system with personalized ads.

Who wants personalized ads? When you watch the Superbowl, or flip through a People magazine, or look around the terminal while waiting for the train - does the lack of personalized ads seem like a problem?

I can't think of anything that personalized ads have ever made better.

>Who wants personalized ads?

Advertisers

Well, and the people trying to make a living producing content.

The average content producer (like every one who isn't already popular) doesn't get to flick a switch between "general ads" and "personalized ads".

They get to choose between no ads (because they are too small to attract private ads) and the ability to make money. Look at Adsense or Youtube.

Non-personalized direct response ads seem to do pretty well.

Can you be more specific? Which platform, how well, and for who?

Leo Laporte talks about how well ads do on his network occasionally on his This Week in Tech show. I don't remember the exact numbers, but his revenues are millions of dollars annually.

Sure, but what works for large channels doesn't work for everyone and that was a component of my original comment.

For example, 90%+ of Youtube creators couldn't negotiate an ad deal like Leo Laporte because they are too small. Generalized ad services like Adsense/Youtube create income for the 90%, and personalization boosts that income allowing more people to produce more content.

Realistically, it doesn't work like that. Sure, a few early adopters will see a temporary boost, but once it generalizes, the prices will drop to where the non-personalized ads stand today, whereas those will fall to the floor. Advertisers will still pay more, but the new margin will go to the platforms that do the personalization, not to the masses of undifferentiated podcasters, who have no market power.

Has that been the case for your content, and would you say it's at all worth it for someone looking to start out?

The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast are both independent and they charge around $6000 per spot for three ad reads.

I really hope this fails though. One of the great things about podcasts is the open RSS based ecosystem.

Me, too. I hope so for two reasons:

1. I want to use my app of choice for listening to pods. I hated the Spotify app when I had a family plan with them.

2. I stopped my family plan because of their horrible, terrible, infuriating support. I was able to simply demonstrate a bug that they've know about for a year, that could be fixed with 5 lines of Java, and they gave me the runaround for days, completely wasting my time. The problem was this: when you reboot Android 9 and have your music on an SD card, it loses track of the SD card because the service starts while Android is checking the SD card, and the Spotify service can't see the SD card then, so it assumes it's gone and switches you to internal storage. Since I had 1500 songs downloaded to my SD card, it then starts to download those 1500 songs again, to my internal storage, which it fills up and causes problems for my phone.

I vow to never pay Spotify another cent.

Another fan of RSS here and open ecosystems.

I’ve had a similar problem on my old phone (running 4.4 Kit Kat). It doesn’t even need to reboot to lose track of the SD card. It happens randomly (seems more likely when the phone is charging) and it’s infuriating when it does – but it’s seldom enough that I’ve learned to live with it. Fair play for making an attempt to get the bug fixed. In my case, I figured Spotify probably wouldn’t support such an old OS.

I work for a company in the podcast hosting space and dynamic insertion in real time during downloads is something a few companies provide, including us. Actually one of our products[1] is just a "plug in your RSS feed and we'll give you another one with updated URLs which dynamically inserts ads during a download", so you can use a different hosting provider than ours if you want and still get dynamic ad insertion powered by us, since a lot of hosting providers don't have that feature.

[1] https://www.voxnest.com/dynamo/

The only real issue RSS has is that ads have to be baked in. Sadly I don't know if we could have an open system with personalized ads.

They've already figured out how to do this. I download the Waypoint podcast (which is part of the Vice Media family) via old-school RSS feed, and the most recent episode I downloaded had a pre-roll ad which specifically called out the city that I live in.

> Sadly I don't know if we could have an open system with personalized ads.

I'm not a fan of podcasts getting personalized ads. I'm disappointed about Anchor being acquired here because they've introduced a way for smaller podcasters to get ads for their podcasts (that they can read themselves!) without going the personalized route.

I don't love the idea of personalized ads in general, but I'd sure love to listen to a full podcast without an ad for meundies and stamps.com

Some podcasts I've listened to recently have had local ads injected into them at the start/end. I can tell it's happening because it takes a few seconds for a download to progress after I start it.

Ad networks already have mechanisms for podcasts to choose timestamps, so they can be injected in the middle as well.

Based on complaints I've heard (mostly from Marco Arment, on podcasts he guests on), the ad-injection platforms are often responsible for horribly mangling the mp3 format. They tend to not update the mp3 file's stated length, resulting in time-remaining being off if you trust it.

Plus, of course, dynamic ad lengths completely break the ability to share timestamps for podcasts -- no "you should really listen to the bit starting at 17:52"...

Npr and old media solved this a while ago. national news shows follow strict schedules, with fixed length breaks at fixed times. Local stations inject their own content into the stream. And a lot of that is produced live.

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