Even without paying for podcasts, ad reads in podcasts are pretty much the most consumer-friendly form of advertising on the internet. There's no privacy invasion. The ads are pretty well targeted because podcast producers generally know and try to respect their audiences. And they can even be pretty funny and entertaining when hosts can stray a bit off-script.
Slight but worrying privacy invasion. Podcasts are increasingly inserting targeted ads based on download analytics. Just the other day, I was listening to a British podcast that advertised for a local company in Seattle, where my IP address tells them I'm from.
The extent to which a podcast can target users has been somewhat limited until now. But if you use Spotify, they know what content you're listening to, and your exact listening behavior, as well as who you are. There's no doubt in my mind that they pay attention to that data internally, and very little doubt that they'll move to expose more and more of it to advertisers.
The Spotify® ads are not part of the episode, it launches a new file basically and you get a new seek bar that says 30 seconds total rather than it being part of the audio stream that you downloaded. I was frankly surprised it let me seek to the end, but yeah that's not gonna last long.
Also, I'm a premium member and I got ads on a podcast (from one of the ones they own themselves no less!). Fuck that shit. Unsubscribed from that podcast and will also from any others when I hear they're now "exclusive". I don't need more ads for products that I already paid for in my life. I also keep considering reverting to the pirate bay and a €13 128GB sd card, since the player is rather buggy and I can see in my firewall that the app tries to report who-knows-what to Facebook and other advertisers (again, as a premium member...), but it's not Spotify that would hurt the most from that so I feel like there isn't really a point.
Even without paying for podcasts, ad reads in podcasts are pretty much the most consumer-friendly form of advertising on the internet. There's no privacy invasion. The ads are pretty well targeted because podcast producers generally know and try to respect their audiences. And they can even be pretty funny and entertaining when hosts can stray a bit off-script.