PocketCasts inserting adds into podcasts

Listening to MBW726 and was very surprised to hear an ad for World War Tech just before the transition to the TicTok segment. I use PocketCasts and given his utterly different the ad was from TWIT (not to mention that TWIT.TV doesn’t do pre-recorded ads except for the house ads) - I believe PocketCasts inserted it.

Curious of anyone else has had this experience recently. It’s the first time I’ve encountered it.

1 Like

Leo has previously stated that some of the podcasts are using a third party to insert ads when they don’t have enough “in house” ads to fill all slots.

3 Likes

not just PocketCast, I just heard the same ad in Apple Podcasts. Very jarring.

1 Like

I’ve heard of some podcasts doing it based on how they generate their feed, but I haven’t heard of PocketCasts doing this.

2 Likes

I asked PocketCasts about this on Twitter. This is what they replied.

msedge_2020-08-12_13-04-39

So - extrapolating from that they are saying - whomever TWIT is using to handle their podcast syndication feeds is doing this. If this is by choice from TWIT due to the need for revenue - I can live with it, but would like to know about it in advance. If it’s not by choice - then TPTB may want to investigate.

2 Likes

There’s a previous discussion here:

https://www.twit.community/t/podcast-inserting-local-commercials

In short:

To be clear, Pocketcasts isn’t doing it. It’s not the podcatcher, it’s the show itself. We host it on megaphone, when megaphone sees your ip it builds a show with geo-targeted advertising on the fly.

We are not adding ad positions. It’s the same number of ads as always, but in shows that aren’t sold out (chronically TWiG) we might insert an ad in the unsold ad position. They still may be host read. And they might not. We’re testing it. We have complete right of refusal for any advertiser, so it won’t be crap ads.

I understand it’s not how TWiT started out (although to be fair we started out without ads entirely for the first few years), but it might be the only way forward in the age of Covid (and the rapidly ad-technified podcast world). Such is life.

6 Likes

Leo - thank you for clarifying. I must have missed this discussion, but I also must have been just lucky (for whatever measure of luck that’s worth) to have this be my first exposure to it. And the logic you mention makes sense - it was just disconcerting since I hadn’t encountered it previously with TWIT shows. But I completely get it from your perspective.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. Very much appreciated.

1 Like

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. The fact that you were listening on PocketCasts has nothing to do with it. But, Leo has already been by and explained.

2 Likes

@Leo is it possible to make one of the podcast advert threads sticky, so that people who only come here not the main TWiT site know it is happening? Or an official announcement in a sticky thread?

1 Like