Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open access ad-driven model over a marketplace where I have to pay every single podcast I listen to $5 a month. And hell, podcast ads weren't tracking and profiling me.

I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.

Podcasts are a great example. They've had to do advertising the old fashion way, by market research and trying to figure out which ad campaigns are more effective without mass surveillance.

Often they use the strategy of widespread name recognition, which is why you can probably think of a mattress brand, and a recruiting platform off the top of your head. That's effective advertisement without tracking.

A podcast is a podcast. Some of the podcasts I listen to have put a bunch of content behind a Patreon paywall. The distinction whether it's an RSS feed isn't meaningful. I still don't have access.

You can subscribe to password protected podcasts in many players just by including the username and password in the url.

Patreon gives you a private RSS feed so paid podcasts are indeed a possibility. It is similar to getting your private activity ATOM feed from Github for example.

Some podcasts do algorithmic auction style ad sales with targeting based off geolocation on the downloading ip address. This works by generating a new audio file for each download. I think the industry calls it "dyanmic ad insertion".

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