I do not enjoy how popular Spotify’s programmatic ads are getting for podcasts that just want some magic and free ad revenue. It is a truly horrible and jarring experience to have your listening suddenly interrupted with an ad. There is no intro out outro, the ad just interrupts the audio and then suddenly ends again. Thankfully most are around 30-60 seconds, which makes then easy to skip.
I hope podcast creators are listening to how horrible it sounds in content. If they are still choosing to keep it … fine, I guess?
I’m excited for a service that can process podcasts and strip out these awful ads. Advertisers heard how good podcast conversion rates were, and then seem to have missed the whole reason why the advertising worked in the first place.
(To be clear, I am absolutely fine with traditional ad reads that the podcast hosts themselves do and weave in thoughtfully to the podcast.)