Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

I think the podcasts i listen to will not work, the moderators speak the ads themselves. Luckily it‘s easy to skip ahead 15 seconds at a time. At least ads in podcasts cannot track me so i don‘t feel i have to block them for that reason alone.

View on HN

There's a thing called "server side ad injection" (more like cancer injection) that inserts arbitrary ads directly in the audio stream so the ad is independent from the original producer. Presumably they do some rudimentary tracking based on IPs, user-agent and whether your podcast client downloaded the file past the point where the ad is injected.

I worked in that industry 12 years ago, and already back then indeed there was a simple method to link some ID (usually cookie) to the injected content.

The startup I worked at used it for contests, out of 100k downloads of a podcast, 1 of them would get a different starting or ending segment to give away something. So it was persistent to your user-login on the podcasting portal (which was a thing back then :-))

I'm fine with podcast ads because I want the excellent podcasts I enjoy to continue existing. That said, I cannot stand injected ads, since they're often injected in awkward places and are jarring to the experience. I'll (not exactly happily but not angrily) listen to a live read where the podcaster has at least taken the time to try not to destroy the flow of the entire podcast.

All that said, the best ads (from a listener experience POV) are the extremely short, to the point ads that are honestly too short to put the effort into skipping. Planet Money (and the NPR podcasts I listen to in general) does this well. I'm curious what their CPMs are relative to a typical ad.

Yeah I listen to a somewhat niche podcast from the UK, and recently I've been getting ads in my native German in it.

Also, there's difference between a company sending in a clip to be played, and actually having the presenter say the ad out loud themselves.

The latter is unthinkable on commercial radio, where separating ads from 'content' is a skill unto itself.

Indeed in this situation it will not work in the current state of the ad detector.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com