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Comment by nickthegreek | Hacker News Reader

So its ethical to manually skip the ads but not to automate the process?

I don't believe GP was making a point about ethics, but rather one of economics. In general it's not smart to advertise this to people if you want to keep your podcasts free for as long as possible.

Podcasts and podcast advertisers know we can skip them, they accept this. If they see a lot of users skip ALL of them, it isn't okay.

How are they seeing that ads have been skipped? That seems like it would only happen if your player is spying on you.

The coupon codes or referral links being advertised will see a drop in traffic.

That seems like it would only happen if your player is spying on you.

No. It works the same way any newspaper, radio, and TV advertising work.

If advertisers sponsor a podcast and get zero return, then the advertisers stops sponsoring the podcast and the podcast dies.

A world where all podcasts have lo-fi production values and only weirdos with too much time and a LOT of interest in the topic at hand make them would be wonderful. The audio version of the early web. They can have podcast web rings instead of ads!

Exactly. Because the podcaster is saying the script (normally), we may actually listen (pay attention) to it. That's what they hope for. If there isn't even a chance in hell that we would even START to hear it, then there's no more ad spending. Which means there's less content because not everyone can do the stuff for free at high quality.

Even if you skips 90% of a 90 second ad, the advertiser still has 9 seconds to get a pitch in. Sometimes in advertising, just reminding the users you exist is enough. If you hear "Dave's Pizza" twelve times before going to the grocery store, then you're much more likely to subconsciously grab one if you see them one in the freezer.

Podcast advertisers often fall into a category of product where name recognition is important. They are okay knowing that most of us skip the ads because they know the audience will hear the name before they have a chance to skip the ad.

I will say I do agree for the most part. I did try out square space for 2 months when I had a business idea. The idea was flawed to begin with... mainly because I came up with it when really drunk... but hey, I wasn't displeased with them (their ads are pretty honest) and I never would have tried them out if they didn't slap checks in a bunch of youtuber faces.

Actually... now that I think about it... I think I do respond better to podcast ads. There's 5 or 6 instances, this past year, that I checked out companies because of them. I've only done that once for a tv commercial in my lifetime and... I don't think I ever clicked on a banner ad before... on purpose. Never on purpose. Accident, yes.

I think it's because they're not, "OH MY SHIT LOOK AT ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" types of ads.

Some people would prefer not to listen to podcasts at all, if they had to listen to ads.

Then they can do that. It's pretty simple to do.

You just decide the transaction isn't worth it, and then not execute the transaction. I do it whenever I decide not to buy a Tesla.

Edit: meant to say I regularly don't buy a Tesla, not regularly do. College student, definitely couldn't afford one

Transaction? I asked for an MP3 and you sent it. Transaction over.

Exactly. And if you don't like what's in the MP3, you have the option of not listening to it.

... or just parts of it.

Your loss - I have found tons of interesting things that I would not have Mike Duncan's revolutions is just one.

No loss here. I listen to several podcast, but I usually skip the ads. If that was not possible, I would not listen to podcasts. Podcasts can be nice, but there is an abundance of people that want their voices heard.

Take this a step farther.

Advertisers care about conversions -- this is why promo codes exist. If podcast advertisers don't see a steady tick of users spending money via the promo codes they distribute, they'll stop advertising. The impressions are way less valuable than conversions are.

So is it unethical (or "un-strategic" if you prefer) to not buy from brands that are mentioned by your favorite podcaster? If people en-mass start making educated purchasing decisions and ignoring openly silly ads from WeWork or matress companies, is that harmful to the industry?

Advertising itself in its current state is harmful. People treat it like, "you listen for ads and you get the content for free." But no -- the ads manipulate you. If on average most people are not being manipulated, then the system doesn't work. The manipulation is the part that advertisers care about. It's not free. Objectively, if advertising was not manipulating your purchasing decisions in a non-optimal way, it would not be worth doing.

From that perspective, I'm more than happy to burn advertising to the ground, even if it means taking out a few podcasters.

You can also take the perspective that advertising is a zero-sum game where nobody wins and consumers aren't affected, but every business has to spend just to keep up with each other. In which case, I'm also happy to burn the industry to the ground to reduce pointless corporate waste and reduce the cost of entry for new businesses.

Is it ethical not to look at a billboard when you're walking down the street?

Is it ethical to mute the TV when commercials come up?

I think it's just your choice, right?

I believe this is false equivalency. I probably agree with the overall argument that it's not unethical, but in both examples you give you're not requesting someone's service in exchange for nothing. For TV, you're already paying for a service, so do what you will. For billboard's, you're literally getting nothing in return or asking to be bombarded by ads.

A better example would probably adblocking on either YouTube or any website. The service is otherwise free, and you're demanding it in some sense.

> For TV, you're already paying for a service, so do what you will.

There are still lots of people who watch ad supported TV broadcast over the air. So I think muting commercials or recording with a DVR and skipping over later is a decent analogy.

This wasn't meant to be a question of ethics, but one of incentives— let's view it from a standpoint of "will this ultimately be bad for society."

> Is it ethical not to look at a billboard when you're walking down the street?

This is fine, you're in a public space where somebody paid for an ad on nearby private property, and society wouldn't be worse off if everybody ignored billboards, advertisers were no longer willing to pay for billboards, and we got rid of the lot of them.

> Is it ethical to mute the TV when commercials come up?

This is fine, you paid for the TV and you pay for cable, and there will be no consequences to many people muting the TV during commercials.

If, however, you're given something for free that could be taken away, and it is able to be offered for free due to the business model of ads, taking this concept to its conclusion where everybody automatically skips over ads will make the free and open podcast system no longer viable.

Advertisers will no longer be willing to pay for ad space on podcasts, and the podcasters will have to move to charging per episode, or more likely, getting tiny royalties from a company like Spotify.

> This is fine, you paid for the TV and you pay for cable, and there will be no consequences to many people muting the TV during commercials.

The nature of advertising has turned the entire TV device into an advertising machine that phones home whether I mute and look away or watch "ad-supported" content, or paid-for content, or my own content. I cannot buy a TV that does not funnel my private life into someone's advertising budget thanks to Smart TVs and the normalization of surveillance capitalism.

If a podcast can not survive off its syndication, its advertising, its royalties, nor off its direct subscriptions, then the market has clearly spoken: that podcast is not providing value to listeners, and if it weren't subsidized as a channel by which advertising campaigns reach a desired market segment, it wouldn't exist at all. Clearly if this scenario causes you to shed tears, perhaps consider donating or subscribing, otherwise that podcast isn't a valuable product, it was a line item on an advertising campaign meant to reach you.

You're conflating things, imagine that billboard was not on the wall and instead it jumped in front of you on the way home.

Imagine the advertisement was not on TV but it was ringing your doorbell.

An option is ethical, one when you replace someone else's work is not. (i don't like advertisement thrown in my face either).

As much as I hate the clever marketing tactics that happen, I wouldn't want them to have one more excuse to invade me more.

This seems like one of them

it's ethical to not look at a billboard.

it's probably not ethical to vandalize a billboard so other people can't see the ad on it.

it's definitely not ethical to sell billboard vandalism as a service, or to patronize a service that does that.

Sure, because some percentage of the users will still listen to the ad, especially if it's the first time they're hearing it. Make it automated, that guarantees that no one is listening to it. Which would mean no revenue for the content creators. Which would lead to a really crappy system.

But advertisements in podcasts are commonly pre-recorded by the podcast host(s) - so the host would still be paid for the advertisement, before it goes online.

If the advertiser isn’t given any information about playback at ad time, then the revenue would not be affected.

If no users are listening to ads, then no one will purchase ads on the podcasts and the revenue for the creators will dry up.

Or they find alternative revenue streams such as:

a.) Patronage/donation model b.) Paywalls c.) Integrated the advertising into the program rather than making it a separate ad read

Not sure if you are suggesting that is good or bad. I see all those as bad. I don't like being guilted, paywalls just suck (also for the podcasters, they lose all their word of mouth), and blurring the lines between ads and content is awful

Unless it becomes widely known that a large share of the podcast listening audience uses apps that automatically skip the ads. That devalues the podcasts to advertisers.

That might work in the very short term.

It shouldn't take long for advertisers to realize that a) podcast listeners tend to skip over ads or b) podcast ads don't result in sales.

I think some ads are sponsored links / promo codes. I am not sure in that situation if they get paid for reading the ad or only get commission from the sales.

Well the question I don't see answered anywhere is how well this actually works. For some podcasts where the ad's are per-recorded and played across a couple different podcasts it seems the problem is pretty easy to solve.

OTOH, I've seen a number of youtube and podcasts where the Ads are read by the hosts as part of the show and are unique for each podcast. I heard one once recently where the host must have had 10 different versions of their travel ad, for the same place worded in slightly different ways. Maybe they were just ad'libing them. Either way, I have a hard time believing this can be easily detected. The flow and voice intonation was such that I didn't even realize it was an ad until 3/4 way through.

The app has a list of the dozen podcast it works with. It doesn't work with any other. That alone should tell you the app simply identifies some sort of jingle or pattern. Or these are the podcasts that OP is willing to manually tag as each episode is released.

Yes. The current system can't predict one way or the other if users are skipping the ads; if this app were to become widespread, it becomes known factually and advertising revenue dries up.

Advertising revenue should dry up.

The twist here is that he's make a profit from automating that process. It's not necessarily unethical, but it's morally dubious, at least.

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