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.