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Comment by LeftHandPath | Hacker News Reader

But advertisements in podcasts are commonly pre-recorded by the podcast host(s) - so the host would still be paid for the advertisement, before it goes online.

If the advertiser isn’t given any information about playback at ad time, then the revenue would not be affected.

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That might work in the very short term.

It shouldn't take long for advertisers to realize that a) podcast listeners tend to skip over ads or b) podcast ads don't result in sales.

Unless it becomes widely known that a large share of the podcast listening audience uses apps that automatically skip the ads. That devalues the podcasts to advertisers.

If no users are listening to ads, then no one will purchase ads on the podcasts and the revenue for the creators will dry up.

Or they find alternative revenue streams such as:

a.) Patronage/donation model b.) Paywalls c.) Integrated the advertising into the program rather than making it a separate ad read

Not sure if you are suggesting that is good or bad. I see all those as bad. I don't like being guilted, paywalls just suck (also for the podcasters, they lose all their word of mouth), and blurring the lines between ads and content is awful

Well the question I don't see answered anywhere is how well this actually works. For some podcasts where the ad's are per-recorded and played across a couple different podcasts it seems the problem is pretty easy to solve.

OTOH, I've seen a number of youtube and podcasts where the Ads are read by the hosts as part of the show and are unique for each podcast. I heard one once recently where the host must have had 10 different versions of their travel ad, for the same place worded in slightly different ways. Maybe they were just ad'libing them. Either way, I have a hard time believing this can be easily detected. The flow and voice intonation was such that I didn't even realize it was an ad until 3/4 way through.

The app has a list of the dozen podcast it works with. It doesn't work with any other. That alone should tell you the app simply identifies some sort of jingle or pattern. Or these are the podcasts that OP is willing to manually tag as each episode is released.

I think some ads are sponsored links / promo codes. I am not sure in that situation if they get paid for reading the ad or only get commission from the sales.

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