I’m happy to adopt a new podcast app if it has sponsorblock natively or through a plug-in. Otherwise let me know if there’s some other way to make it work. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as all of the segments tagged for skipping are crowdsourced which would also work for Podcasts.
I just unsubscribe when it becomes too prominent. There was a guy doing a recap of the news of the day in 5 minutes. Suddenly added 2 minutes of ads. Fuck that
None that I’ve found has anything close to SponsorBlock for youtube, in theory it could work, even SponsorBlock has open issue for it.
The problem is, a lot of podcasts are using dynamic ads insertion, which means the ads are added on the fly when user download an episode. Ads length could be different from person to person, and there’s a possibility of empty slot too, where the podcast unable to sell the slot. “We’ll be back after this short message,” and jump straight into the next segment. No ad.
I suppose the solution would be having people tag a soundbite at the beginning and at the end of each ad slot. Then when the app “hears”, the beginning soundbite it can just skip forward until it finds the ending one.
I have noticed the Dynamic ads are audibly different in many ways. Like higher volume or has music added. I wonder if we could use that to auto detect the ads and skip it?
Idk everybody’s situation, but I just listen like this and manually skip ads. My car has buttons on the steering wheel for forward and backward (if I skip back into the podcast). My earbuds skip forward and backward with double presses on the right and left earbud respectively. Listening otherwise, it’s not that hard for me to grab my phone and skip through a few minutes of ads. Would it be better if it were automatic? Sure. But I’m much more annoyed by YouTube ads popping up every 3-7 minutes.
My ads only come on when it is the absolute worst situation to interact with my device.
Holding a basket of laundry???! Oh better play and ad.
Are your hands muddy from cleaning out a gutter? Better play an ad.
You handling raw chicken??? It is ad time!!!
Their are ways to avoid YouTube ads. YouTube is my favorite platform without ads.
Pushing buttons is too hard
I would love this too.
Right now I use Pocket Casts which lets you set a specific time to skip at the beginning or end of a podcast. Useful for static ads but not for the dynamic ones throughout the show.
I also use Pocket Casts …and I just skip the ads manually. I set the skip forward time to 30 seconds and I set skip back to 10, makes it pretty easy to hop past them.
This is exactly what I do now. But skipping ahead and back is tough when I’m listening while cooking and have raw chicken on my hands.
Podcasts are yet one more thing that ads have more or less ruined for me. I rarely listen to them due to the sponsorships. It is like trying to watch YouTube on my TV through the YouTube app instead of the Smarttube app.
Would you pay for them? I mean these are usually just people making them not giant corporations. How do they make money.
If the price was what I deemed acceptable and the method of doing so was decently centralized. I’m not going to sign up to 15 different podcasts with 15 separate transactions every month.
So yes, I would pay for them if they make it attractive to pay for. Ultimately the viability of their business model is not my problem. So even if it is one guy in his garage, it is on him to create something I would be willing to pay for. If they can’t then oh well I can easily do without their podcast.
