Podcasts: Ads Masquerading as Content

I just turned on the first episode of a new podcast I’d subscribed to. The first 30 seconds was the host talking about a subject he was interested in. It turned out this was actually an ad for a VPN. There was no indication that this was an ad, no background music or noise to indicate that it might be an ad. The “real” content followed.

It was an ad masquerading as content and the host did this knowingly. How is this acceptable? If this happened on Google there would be uproar yet in the podcasting world it’s becoming more and more prevalent.

I’m sure it’s hard to make money podcasting and even if you give people the option to pay only a fraction do so, but this can’t be the way forward.

Obviously the answer is to unsubscribe but as someone who has loved podcasts over the last decade or more it’s disappointing to see this direction.