UPDATE: Reviews section refreshed, redesigned, searchable: Go take a look
My understanding of it is that as podcasts have taken off over the last decade or so the money men have got involved.
In the early days they were all independent, if your podcast became popular you’d be able to pick up some sponsors and start making some decent money. These days most podcasts aren’t independent, they have a contract with a large company that take care of distribution and advertising.
I find that the majority of the good ones out there still operate on the original model and the ones full of ads tend to be backed by the legacy/traditional/corporate media trying to play catch-up.
At the end of the day if you find value in a podcast which you can can consume for free a few ads seems reasonable, if it becomes too much you can take your “business” elsewhere, the options at this point are almost endless.
Maybe the most annoying are the ones advertising the fact that you can pay to advertise your podcast on this podcast... Actually I think even worse are the ones for podcasts that I have absolutely no interest in and have people who think I know or care who they are imploring me to listen to them spouting shit about finance, looking after kids, sports i can't stand. They're invariably people with irritating voices too.
I do wonder about the economic model of adverts within podcasts for other podcasts....
Dynamic Ad Insertion: Technology allows hosting platforms to automatically inject targeted commercials into pre-set slots, meaning ads can change based on your location or time of listening rather than being permanently baked into the audio file.
This is why people are reporting slightly different experiences. Even on Goalhanger podcasts sometimes I think I get a double trail and no actual advert (though rarely). Listen when you're on holiday and sometimes you'll get foreign ads, sometimes none. it might even be that noones targeting 'people like you' that week.
Adam Buxton does this best of course. While the RIH guys sometimes sound like they're taking the piss when reading the ads out, Buxton actually makes the ads entertaining and worth listening to in their own right.
As far as subscriptions go, the licence fee starts to look an absolute bargain once you add up a few individual podcast subs. I could *maybe* see some logic if there was an 'Podcasts' sub that gave you all Pods ad free and distributed based on listenership but a RIH and RIP sub would be £140 a year by themselves. And I'm pretty sure they're individual rather than 'family' subs.
The licence fee is only £180. I'd happily pay a higher BBC fee and have them commissioning more content again. (they do seem to buy the rights to quite a few commercial podcasts now and that you can listen to with ads via other sources or ad free via BBC Sounds)
I don't wish to derail the thread and it's probably worth a thread in itself, but my single biggest - nay, only - objection to the licence fee is the Captia Nazis charged with enforcement. They're such bastards that I want to stop paying it on principle.
I don't wish to derail the thread and it's probably worth a thread in itself, but my single biggest - nay, only - objection to the licence fee is the Captia Nazis charged with enforcement. They're such bastards that I want to stop paying it on principle.
I've never got on the wrong side of them but how would you do it differently? It seems to have become common knowledge that either TV detector vans never existed or they don't work any more. Very few homes don't have an aerial or satellite. Very few people genuinely don't have/never watch TV but increasing numbers of people claim not to.
