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Comment by clay_the_ripper | Hacker News Reader

This is something I would use - not to steal but so I could listen to certain podcasts for sleep. The host intros and ads for this certain podcast are terribly distracting from what is otherwise incredible content.

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Other use case is relistening to old podcasts - about half the stuff I listen to is historical which lends itself well to a relistening 10 years later. The content may well be still relevant but the ads are surely not.

The other podcasts I listen to are current and mostly ad supported - this isn't great for them

Right now someone, somewhere, is thinking of a way to use this to identify the ad portions in old podcasts and overlay new, perpetually relevant, dynamic ads.

This is already being done. Same as geo targeting dynamically inserted ads based on the IP of the downloading client.

They use the IP! That explains why I was getting Spanish ads for a few days after returning home.

My podcast downloader is always on an IP from another country, I don't mind the ads nearly as much when I can't understand a word they're saying!

I lived in CA and got advertisements for Ralphs. I spent some time in Sedona and all of the sudden I got the same advertisements, same jingle etc but instead of Ralphs it was Fry's. That definitely threw me off.

I'm fairly sure that most podcast platforms now include dynamic ad segments - I listen to a few and whilst some (usually where the hosts record ads themselves) seem to have static ads, others definitely have ads which are updated automatically

Yeah for sure. But is it being done for the huge back catalog of much older podcasts? Maybe the big players already have teams of people hunting for old ad breaks, but this could alleviate the burden.

It's a shame - other countries' ads often strike me as quaint, hilariously awful, at best amusingly weird, and I'm willing to tolerate them to a point. But when an ad breaks in that's obviously targeted based on my location it feels ingratiating, dirty, offensive.

Not listening to ads is never stealing

Right? Every player comes with those "skip forward 30s" buttons, and surely the creators and advertisers are aware that many folks tap that button anyway.

I'm hoping now that Google Podcast moved to Youtube Music which can be added to Youtube Playlist, podcast listeners are going to figure out sponsorblock applies. I wonder if that's also why a bunch of my podcasts haven't migrated to Youtube.

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