Tangent: Now that I occasionally play music on Spotify I get ads in the form "We know you were a premium user before, how is life with the free service now?". I find that somewhat creepy and disturbing.
In the beginning of time (well, maybe not that far back), there was TV. Soon, TV had ads in them, but fear not, because you can pay extra each month and get access to premium channels that don't show ads, because you are paying extra. Soon after, they started showing ads as well. But then came the streaming services, promising Ad-free lands if you just subscribed to their service. And people did, but soon thereafter, found that the streaming services also added ads when you decided what you wanted to watch. Amazon Prime is a prime example of this.
This is interesting to me because besides ads that are hardcoded into the podcast by creators, I have never heard an ad in Spotify premium, not a single time for years I've been using it. Not sure if country of origin has something to do with it, but I'm from Poland.
Edit: Apparently Spotify also does dynamic ads too! Greedy...
At that point, why not just use another service instead of Spotify for podcasts? E.g. Pocket Casts. If you pay for the Spotify subscription I'd expect _all_ ads to be removed.
I've heard about some dynamic adds Spotify supposedly adds, that are usually not related to the podcast itself, but I've never encountered a single one like that.
You probably have heard them. Old episodes of a podcast with anachronistic ads for new products are one clue.
I stopped listening to podcasts on Spotify because of the ads remaining with premium.
They try hard to make it sound like a sponsor spot. If the voice changes, that's another clue, but sometimes the advertiser will pay the host to read a new ad.
First search result:
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/spotify-podcast-dynami...
If Spotify are actually hosting the content themselves, it’s a different story, and I’d expect them to be able to not insert ads for premium users. If they’re just reading the feed and sending the request to origin, it’s a bit more difficult.
For example some youtube influencers lost a court case in Germany because they didn't make that clear enough (or didn't try to at all).
So I'm very surprised Spotify didn't just forbid uploading ads to their platform.
One of the reasons YT requires it is so they can replace an ad that conflicts with the contents paid promotion with something else (Another reason being FCC Regs).
spotify can't do that unless they own the rights to the podcast, otherwise they might run afowl of copyright laws. I believe their intent is to have one place for podcasts (both their own premium ones and freely accessible public ones).
When I watch a streamer on Twitch, they'll advertise. Then, the streamer will upload the video to YouTube. Who is responsible for getting rid of the ad?
I would expect the creator of the content to remove ads and the ToS to say "Do not upload content that contains advertisements".
I find it fascinating that you're OK to pay for a product and then watch ads on top.
This is the only place where I would like to see more control from platforms. And I believe they can. Youtube already requires to label video containing paid promotion. They can require to label exact time interval so that it can be auto-skipped (without sponsorblock).
Instead they release one shitty "feature" after another.
1) Sometimes the Premium mode of YouTube doesn't work, and you still get the ads (this looks like a cache bug or something like that where the Premium setting is not activated).
YouTube doesn't believe it's real, though I managed to screenshot it.
2) You pay for YouTube premium, but you still get in-video embedded ads that creators encode in the stream, like LinusTechTips. In a way this is not fair, as the promise to stop seeing ads is not kept.
YouTube could enforce their policy to force the content creators to mark their sponsored videos segment and automatically skip them if you have Premium.
As for the ads: you could install uBlock Origin and not have to deal with ads in any case.
You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
I seem to recall reading that advertisers can outbid premium in the ad auction, in which case you will still see ads. Can anyone confirm?
User Convenience. You just have one app for your music and your podcasts. From a podcast creators point of view Spotify has a large userbase for your listeners to fid you on. Looking at the stats for a couple of podcats I help in the backend of, we tend to get more people listening on Spotify then we do on any of the other platforms.
> If you pay for the Spotify subscription I'd expect _all_ ads to be removed.
Spotify doesn't share the subscription with most podcasts (Obv exception being Joe Rogan, but thats an exclusivity deal, I'm not sure if it even went "Ad Free" after the Spotify deal as I've not listened to it in years). The vast majority of podcasts on Spotify are from podcast creators submitting their RSS feed to Spotify because it has a decent userbase. This is the same for Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Tunein/Stitcher/Etc.
If Spotify removed the ads from podcasts to serve ad free versions to their paying subs without the permission of the content creators that would most likely be copyright infringement.
If Spotify asked permission to remove such ads to avoid copyright issues, creators would want to be compensated for the drop in Ad Rev. Creators would have to report lower listener numbers to advertisers because paid Spotify listeners wouldn't get the ads being sold. If Spotify did this it would be easier for Spotify to just ask creators for an Ad-Free RSS feed for paying subs (which a lot of podcasters have to give to their own paying listeners).
Edit: Spotify does have a "Spotify Podcast Ads" system, but thats just for content that is "Spotify Original and Exclusive titles" and not (atleast yet) open to podcasters who also distribute their content on other platforms.
The reason you might not use pocket casts is because the podcast could be exclusive to Spotify for example.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/sp...
So... Spotify have been buying popular podcasts outrights and signing exclusivity deals. Those are only on spotify now.
Assume the best, not the worst in peoples arguments, please. Cheers.
I wasn't disagreeing with your point. I was adding to it. I agree that if spotify annoy listeners with ads, they'll go elsewhere. Podcasts, unlike music, are (were?) a mostly free media... as in both beer and liberty.
Hence... Spotify has been pursuing exclusives ans a solution to the "why should people listen to our ads" problem.
Those were Spotify ads promoting other podcasts, not sponsors promoted in the podcast itself.