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?
I’ve noticed a major increase in ads injected into podcasts. In particular, I listen to 6 podcasts from Marketplace APM (Marketplace Tech, Morning Report (UK, US, Midmorning), Marketplace, and Make Me Smart). Warning, mini-rant incoming…
They started with preroll and post roll spots which were just self-promotion for their other shows. This was annoying on it’s own because I’d hear the same ads like 12 times a day. But this year those spots were converted into location-based targeted ads, they are totally not the same volume or tonal style totally breaking my concentration. And there are spots in the middle of the episodes too. So now I would be “forced” to listen to the same ads like 30 times a day. Unbearable.
As to solutions:
There’s an existing feature request for the top Open Source android podcast app AntennaPod.
I’ve been planning out my own hypothetical approach. The idea would be to use multiple strategies (similar to what @bet, @133arc585 and @pallettownbry recommended in this thread) but actually implemented in a gPodder compatible self-hosted podcast server. This would allow one to offload the resource intensive work (audio analysis, audio transcription, LLM) to a more capable server (hypothetically) while being compatible with nearly any podcast app.
P.S. I actually pay for premium services for ad-free content where available: CBB World, Crooked Media Friends of the Pod, and Stitcher Premium (RIP).
As someone who setup his own nas over the pandemic I really like this approach. Needed a time intensive project to stay sane and I keep finding more useful things it can do.
Another thought I’ve had, plex has a skip intro feature. This works by scanning the audio from multiple episodes and showing the skip button when available. Maybe something like that could build up an ad library of the most obnoxious repetitive podcast ads and work across different podcasts. It wouldn’t work for unique self reads though.
I wish I had the technical knowledge to build something like this but I done even know where to begin.
Yeah, AntennaPod already has an auto skip config that I use to skip the first or last N seconds. Which I’ve configured. But it’s not technically always 30 seconds or 120 seconds. And that doesn’t help with mid episode ads.
That's a decent solution, but unfortunately doesn't have handy podcast app features like silence trimming, voice boosting, etc. Great suggestion though!
Silence trimming is something you need to be careful of. If you listen to any comedy podcasts or storytelling, silence (pauses) have meaning and value. If you just listen to news or talk podcasts, its pretty nice to have. I have it turned on or off for selected podcasts, and it tells me it’s trimmed over 1 full day of silence from my listening.
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.
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.
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).
I have not found this to be the case. There are only a few podcasts I felt I enjoyed enough to financially support, and I stopped donations because I still had to sit through ads. I don't like feeling as if I'm being monetized twice.
Be really cool if more hosts made ad-free supporter versions.
I’ve been down this rabbit hole and found nothing specifically for podcasts, but a lot of pods get posted to YouTube channels, which is a solved problem.
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.
Yeah, this is an interesting subject. I’ve thought about how this would be best implemented myself. I love yt-dlp and sponsorblock apis, as the cli yt-dlp has a sponsorblock flag that trims out the sponsored content.
I’m sure podcasts are a bit more difficult to implement a similar strategy as the sponsored comment advertising model is different and more dynamic than yt, but it sounds like an interesting and challenging side project for anyone technically savvy enough and who also has enough time to do so might be inclined to try.
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.
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.
since podcasts are I think just RSS feeds of audio files (mp3 for those I’ve checked) the ads aren’t in any way marked in the stream. The only thing I’ve found is adjusting the skip buttons in antennapod so that skip fwd does 10 seconds, and back does 5; that seems to let me avoid listening to most of the ad; tap fwd until it’s back in material, then back once.
But I listen to a lot less podcasts; if I want hands- and eyes-free material I’m more likely to use TTS in my (text) RSS feed reader of choice, currently Feeder.
Antennapod also has an option to skip the first X seconds of a pod and the last X seconds. It’s really useful when an episode starts with 3 minutes of ads.
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