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?
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.
I mean people said this about SponsorBlock, but it turns out you can crowd source the timestamps… If you built an easy enough UI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I do support a few to get ad free versions but these are almost nonexistent. very few podcasts do this.
My mistake, I only do a few podcasts and they usually advertise their ad free stuff.
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.
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.
I really hate them and would drop them in a hot min if it wasn’t that SYSK is like the best bedtime podcast in the world.
Behind the bastards makes it more bearable because they really take the piss out of the ads every time.
