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Comment by microdrum | Hacker News Reader

Although I personally don’t like Overcast because of the ad injection (which I consider immoral) and the hypocrisy of its author being anti-ads in general (not to mention having built Tumblr, which turned out to be a porn obfuscation service), I agree that this is a bad move by Apple. Doesn’t matter: podcasts are going to go the way of TV, radio, and movies anyway.

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Ad injection?

As far as I know Overcast does not inject ads into podcasts. There are banner ads within the app but that's not "injection"

Overcast doesn’t insert ads into podcasts. Marco objected to including mystery meat binary blobs where he didn’t control the code or ads being served. He controls both the code and the ads for Overcast.

Did you purchase the $10 in app option to turn ads off?

Do you purchase subscriptions to news websites, or do you follow the archive.is links on HN?

Of course I didn't purchase Overcast. There are better free alternatives.

Yes, I do purchase subscriptions to news web sites occasionally, because I don't consider writers being paid to be intrinsically immoral. Given the choice to pay them with ads and pay them directly, I'll take the latter. I suppose "rely on other people seeing ads and/or paying for content to subsidize me" is also an option.

What is a "porn obfuscation service"?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...

I've been using Overcast, and have noticed that with certain podcasts, the audio ad-breaks seem to come in the middle of sentences, and there's no segue from podcast content to ad-read. Is that what you're referring to by "ad injection"? Or is just that the creator sucks at editing?

That’s called ‘Dynamic Ad Injection’. It’s not Overcast, in fact Marco gets complaints about it.

It’s the podcast host adding ads in via automated means that are supposedly customized for each listener. And doing a poor job of it.

That’s because the podcast in question probably uses a network/hosting service that auto-injects ads. Overcast does NOT inject ads into podcasts. It offers banner ads in the app for podcasts (and you can pay to turn that off), but it doesn’t inject any content into the podcasts themselves.

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