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> On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless.

I get a lot of these for elections which already took place... in places I don't even live. It seems like these are mistakes on the part of the people placing the ads, it's hard to imagine they're seeing the view metrics from after the event and deciding to keep spending.

> I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions.

This has happened to a bunch of youtubers I follow recently as well! They mentioned youtube funding all but dried up as advertising dollars moved to more short-form content. I've heard maybe 5-8 of them mention it.

Seems like your description of what is happening would HELP podcast ad revenue, though? If web sites are no longer a good source of eyeballs (since people are just getting their info from AI summaries and aren't visiting web site), wouldn't that shift MORE ad spend to podcasts, where you will be more likely to reach an audience?

Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on something that's totally unproven.

I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast listener counts for ad purposes.

> I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago

As someone who buys ads on IG: this is almost certainly because the advertiser has misconfigured their settings for that ad campaign.

Why are podcasts being affected?

Much of the podcast problems were due to Honey leaking any promo code to the world, including employee discounts and customer specific discounts.

When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were paid for driving traffic is lost.

Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model, unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to delete.

Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try to make you pay to remove it.

As a podcast listener, I can think of a few reasons:

- 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC) products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate, podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.

- A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total pool of advertising money available.

- Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to podcast owners is less.

When Spotify picked up podcasts they could now offer way more information and targeting to the ad buyers. Podcasts they just know if you played their podcast can't compete.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's partly because a couple of large ad companies decided to stop backing podcasts which took a large amount of money out of the ecosystem.

Podcasts are much harder to get analytics on since the ecosystem is made up of a bunch of different podcast platforms and services, and I bet that plays into part of it. You might not be able to tell if people are downloading your podcast (a copy might be cached by a podcast provider), you might not know if people are listening or listening all the way through, if people are skipping over your ad, etc.

Ad marketers love statistics.