As someone who aggressively adblocks everything, one of the final places that ads can still reach me is in annoying ad reads within podcasts. Youtube sponsorblock is incredible but it seems no one has yet adapted this for podcasts. Has anyone else managed to find a solution here? As far as i can tell in my googleing, this doesn’t yet exist. Anyone else extremely interested in something that skips/removes sponsor segments from podcasts?
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There’s an app I use called “Snip’d” which uses AI to detect different chapter segments of your podcasts. It doesn’t automatically skip anything for you but it does a pretty good job of finding and pointing out where the ads are and breaking the entire episode up into different chapters.
That sounds like an app begging to be modded to add an autoskip feature.
Brother, from one pirate to another, I think it would be more convenient to support your favorite podcast and they usually upload an ad free version for supporters.
Lol
Not for podcasts on big networks like iHeartRadio as far as I know.
I’ve been listening to Stuff You Should Know for years and since iHeart bought them out the volume and shear annoyance of their ads has gone through the roof. Used to be the actual podcast presenters themselves doing a few quick spots for Squarespace or whatever. Wasn’t jarring because it was the same voices and they didn’t do a bunch of ridiculous zany bullshit. Now every episode has multiple 5-7 ad blocks of the most banal annoying crap.
Would happily use sponsor block on that if I could. I would love a podcast app with this functionality built in.
IHeartradio is the worst. I have dropped off listening to podcasts I otherwise really like. Behind the bastards, anything Robert Evans does really. The ads are too bad.
Behind the bastards makes it more bearable because they really take the piss out of the ads every time.
They’re lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn’t control what ads the network uses, but they’ve literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.
I’ve set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).
There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.
Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like “Ad: X”. In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who’s name begins with "Ad: ", though I don’t know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn’t be very useful.
Another method that could work on some podcasts that don’t use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.
Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like “time for ads”, and the ads will insert. Sometimes it’s always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase “the money zone” on MBMBAM), but that’s not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.
In summary, I don’t know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.
To add to this, some podcasts on certain networks dynamically insert ads based on your location, any other data they have on you. so the ads may be different length for different users, further complicating this.
Definitely a difficult problem still looking for a solution. thanks for your input.
Dynamic ad length wouldn’t be an issue for chapter markers, or “tone delimited” podcasts (the first two categories). It would only be a problem for the third category, which is already the more difficult of the three.
