The BBC recently injected ads into all of their podcasts. Before you start listening to a podcast you get the "This podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. For a long time it was cross promotion but recently that switched to two to three French Swiss ads in a row, before the start of a podcast and then cross-promotion for other ads.
Not only are these automatically injected ads that are loud, obnoxious and in the wrong language for the content, but they’re injected into podcasts going back to 1998.
Automatic Pausing
My fist instinct is “Duck it, I’ll stop listening to their shows then.” This isn’t an empty threat. Every time I start listening to a podcast with injected ads I pause it, and listen to something else. If I listen to podcasts rather than live radio there is one reason. There are no ads. If there are ads then I will not listen.
It is worth noting that there are plenty of podcasts with ads that I listened to, where the presenters are reading the ads. These might be boring if you listen to two or three episodes per day to clear the back log but the creator has taken their time to read their ads.
Injected ads are like AI generated content because they’re automatically chosen based on geography. To be specific I herd ads from BliBlaBlo, Coop, and two or three other companies, one was a fitness company, so it’s not that I didn’t hear the ads and notice them, but rather that my podcast consumption habit is to listen to two or three of them as I walk, run, drive or cook.
Pre-Roll Distractions
There are several BBC podcasts that I enjoy listening to, but their pre-roll ads and cross-promotion get in the way of that. It’s because oftheir cross-promotion on the one hand, and ads on the other that I gave up on dozens of different programs.
I don’t mind hearing promotion for another podcast at the one I just listened to, but listening to an ad for another podcast before I’ve started listening to the current one is absurd. American and English podcasts have that bad habit. It’s a bad habit because as soon as we settle down to listen to a podcast you’re telling us "but you should also listen to that podcast. If we listen to that podcast it will tell us to listen to this podcast. You see how podcasts are like scuba divers walking forwards rather than forwards while wearing diving fins. They’re in danger of tripping themselves up.
The Silver Lining
Recently I downloaded the entire In Our Times Podcast series and I was getting ready to listen when I noticed the Vikings program cross promotion, followed by two to three ads. My reflex was to delete the entire series, and give up.
Instead of giving up on the podcast series I decided to see if Gemini or MyAI could help me trim the first minute, and last minute of every show. I ran a test trim, and when I saw it worked I batch trimmed over a thousand shows.
But Think of the Creators
There is a very high probability that because I downloaded over a thousand shows at once, that the ads were the same for 1020+ shows. I did listen to the ads, and I mentioned who they were for, in this blog post. They’re actually getting different visibility than they bargained for.
The Era
Bloggers like me come from a different era. We came from an era when the web was free and people questioned “How will it ever be profitable?” so the idea of concept of “content for free” is part of the landscape I grew up in. The web has as much value for sharing ideas, and being visible for our thinking, as for direct financial gain. Ironically the web is less profitable now than it was, because of influencer culture and “addictive” social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
I personally don’t see how spreading solitude and isolation are “addictive design patterns” but I grew up in a healthier social network landscape, when the web was about connected conversations, rather than mindless scrolling.
And it Goes On and on My Friends
You may recognise which song I’m alluding to with the title. There was a time when we could listen to TWIT network podcasts, two to three in the time it took to commute from Harrow to Central London. With time though, those podcasts became live-streamed and they gave up on editing. The result is one and a half hours to up to three hours of podcasts. We went from being able to listen to one show per walk, to a third of a show per walk.
You might think that by “trimming” out the adverts I am costing creatives their livelihood.
I am a blogger. I used Google Adsense to “monetise” my blog. The time between 100 CHF payments could be once every two years or less. I destroyed the user experience of those reading this blog to make money for Google but with hardly any trickling down to me.
Rationally Google profits greatly from the long tail that people like me offered. We were demonetised on YouTube because of the crime an influencer commited. They lost that part of the long tail as well.
Ads Quantified: Thirty Three Hours
Before I conclude this blog post, I had about 34 days of podcasts to listen to before I trimmed the ads and cross-promotional injected content. When I removed it I had about 32 hours of content left. I trimmed about thirty three hours of advertising. That’s a day and a half saved in terms of time, and That’s four days of work, if we measure it in working days. That’s a huge saving.
And Finally
I was able to do this for one key reason. Self-hosting via AudioBookShelf. If I was using the Podcasts app on Apple, or Pocketcasts on Android and iOS, or a multitude of other apps I wouldn’t be able to trim the top and tail of a show so easily. It’s by self-hosting that I gain the freedom to remove what I don’t want to listen to. The alternative was to “delete” the entire podcast series and give up.
When you’re walking, driving, or cooking you don’t want to have to reach into your pocket and press fast forward two or three times to skip an ad. You want to enjoy the walk, or the drive, while “you’ll enjoy the show”.
If they spent a little more time on ads that weren’t so toxic, I wouldn’t feel the necessity to skip or delete them. I removed Google Adsense because I didn’t like how they broke the flow of my site.