If we look to podcasts as a model — 490K new episodes in the last 90 days, delivered to users and to aggregators alike via "not dead yet" RSS — ads are placed inline with the content. There is no RSS-related "pact" that precludes the relationships you mentioned.
Related analyst estimate: "US podcast ad spending will surpass $2 billion in 2023 and will account for nearly one-third of digital audio services ad spending." https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-podcast-adver...
RSS makes it very difficult to measure the performance of an ad. Most players in this space wrap a publishers hosted podcast link with their own tracking link, and the main metric of engagement is a download. Downloads themselves are a pretty crude measurement and don’t hold up to something like minutes watched/listened.
Placing ads into the audio directly also just isn’t as performant as streaming it into the media like in video. Publishers and advertisers want more fine grained control over where the ad is placed, when it’s placed, and how it’s consumed by the listener. Podcast ads currently don’t deliver on that.
... and? From the perspective of whom?
> Publishers and advertisers want more fine grained control over where the ad is placed, when it’s placed, and how it’s consumed by the listener.
There you go.
Ad tech is behind when it comes to podcasts? Who fucking cares. Not the audience. Podcast advertising is the closest thing to traditional broadcast ads for TV and radio—when ads were still inert instead of sentient. There's not a damn person on this side of the divide that sees the things you mention as being a significant downside. Not having the self-awareness to realize it is pure déformation professionnelle; this entire comment reads like a burglar lamenting the fact that people keeping their money in the bank instead of at home under their mattresses makes it harder to break in and take it.