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Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

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Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#201

Post by cwkoss »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #111

Nice! Wanted to try something similar for a while using SDR to capture FM radio and start switching radio stations when the radio jockey starts speaking i.e. automatically switch stations when songs are not playing. The Radio jockeys here (India) have started promoting ads as part of their regular content without any disclaimers or mentions that it is a promotion. e.g. They just say, 'you should put your child in thi…

Contact the advertiser's sales department, waste their time, then chew them out for their shady advertising practices. Tell them that every time you hear an ad for them without a disclaimer, you will personally tell 10 friends or strangers that their organization is run by unethical crooks and should be avoided at all cost.

Since you're in India, I wonder how economical it would be to hire a telemarketing company to do this for you.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#202

Post by _bxg1 »

chmln wrote: post #197
_bxg1 wrote: post #174

This is not a good thing. Ad-blockers on the internet are justified because of invasive tracking. Radio and podcasts have no such thing, and ads are are central to their sustainability. If you want to push the world to improve, you can't just rage blindly, you have to identify and move towards a solution that's sustainable for everyone. In the case of ad-supported businesses and services, this means non-tracking, non…

> If you want to push back against tracking in ads, you have to support non-tracking ads. Why? I don't want any ads whatsoever. Maybe it's harsh but if they can't survive without ads then let them go? Many good podcasts already charge money.

Well for one thing, it would be literally impossible to establish a subscription model for radio stations. For another thing, online news sources have been trying to make subscriptions work for years and nobody's figured out how to do it yet.

But going beyond that, who are you to declare that entire mediums' worth of content is invalid simply because of the lack of available mechanisms for collecting the revenue they need to sustain themselves? What a gross oversimplification.

If you want behavior to change, you have to provide a valid alternative. You can only say "I won't put up with X" if there's a viable Y to replace it with. Otherwise it's just "I won't put up with you". In which case, when it comes to businesses, the other party will either get even more aggressive with their tactics, or just die altogether.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#203

Post by therealdrag0 »

onemoresoop wrote: post #144
amrrs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know we don't want to see / hear ads. But at the same time, these ads on the podcast are making livelihoods/income for those content creators and If we strip that off of them, saying I don't like ads but hey I do like your content. Where do you think we can have the line?

If ads were less invasive we’d tolerate them for sure. The problem is that they devoure any medium completely with an excessive quantity of ads, volume bumping, flashing banners, page hijacks, dubious js and are really innefective to begin with. If they were more expensive and used more sparingly they’d be tolerated. But they’re not and people are fighting back.

Podcast ads are so easy to skip. Don't even have to open your phone, just fastforward using headphone buttons.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#204

Post by cwkoss »

buboard wrote: post #24

We also need to start seeing advertising as a way for publishers/performers/makers to cut a slice of benefit from corporate profits. If we remove advertising everywhere, corporates are just going to seek non-media ways to market , and the whole mediascape will lose.

Sounds like a net positive to me.

Media living in fear of offending advertisers limits the range of acceptable discourse and causes it to slant corporatist.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#205

Post by lcfcjs2 »

waylandsmithers wrote: post #44

It's a cool technical achievement, sure. But as a listener of many podcasts I do not support this at all. I love that podcasters can make a living or at least a little money while I listen for free.

Isn't this the same as saying people shouldn't be allowed to drive electric cars because you prefer internal combustion engines?

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#206

Post by j4kp07 »

jordanpg wrote: post #79
mkolodny wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's perfectly fine to block ads. And that ad blockers' primary feature is blocking ads. At the same time, I think most ads aren't malicious. They aren't "intending to do harm". Ads sell things. Sometimes things people want. I'd guess that most people who use ad blockers just don't like being sold things.

I choose to define "unsolicited attempts to take my attention away from things I care about" as harm. I am happy to be sold things, on my own terms. I don't need ads to find out about things to buy.

You can't get much weaker and softer than this right here. I'm just trying to imagine the PTSD you must experience when faced with billboards on the highway or when you attend a sporting/musical event and see BoA plastered around the venue.

Also, it's not "unsolicited" when you made the choice to turn on the radio and turn up the volume. If you don't like the ads, turn the radio off.

> I am happy to be sold things, on my own terms.

I'm pretty sure everyone is happy with everything, when they define their own terms.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#207

Post by mantap »

josefresco wrote: post #134
fiblye wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block ads because I don't want to be conditioned to buy things I don't need or legitimately want. I don't want the mega rich to gradually chip away at my mind day by day, hour by hour in order to make themselves another fat pile of cash. If a site shows me some sad puppy image about me stealing their money by blocking their brainwashing, I just add their whole site to my filter. Content on the internet powered by a…

My clients are small business owners. They run ads. They are not "mega rich" and are not building a "fat pile of cash". You need to step outside your bubble, and consider the broader ad landscape.

The well has been poisoned. If most ads were politely advertising local businesses, nobody would object. But the essence of advertising is to seek attention, and the inevitable result of that is ads that are obnoxious and discourteous. Even if they are not outright dishonest or manipulative.

Businesses do not communicate between themselves using obnoxious language. Business letters are stereotypically formal. They reserve the brash language of advertising for their potential customers, and those subjected to it are within their rights to point out this hypocrisy.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#208

Post by fouric »

willis936 wrote: post #103
lotsofpulp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is people are willing to pay for certain products with their attention, via ads, but not with money. Given the choice of paying $1 for a podcast or pirating said podcast, sufficient number of people would not choose the first option to make it a viable business.

In fairness, $1 for a podcast episode is egregious. Almost no one would pay that. Piracy has gone down a lot in the past 15 years because content owners made reasonable decisions.

I value my time anywhere between $10/hour and $100/hour, depending on the context, and I would bet that the vast majority of Americans would do the same.

$1 for a 30-minute podcast episode is $2/hour, which is far from "egregious" by almost any standard.

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#209

Post by j4kp07 »

mantap wrote: post #131
Scirra_Tom wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's perfectly fine to block them. I think there were some legal rulings IIRC in the UK regarding software to auto mute/block/skip ads on TV/Radio, but for the life of my can't find them. If it was ruled illegal, then it being "perfectly fine to block them" might be correct ethically but not legally, although I suspect the details of implementation might be the important point.

If it's illegal to mute ads automatically, is it therefore illegal to mute them manually? How can automating a human function be illegal? Computers don't have legal capacity they simply do what humans tell them to. All computer actions are ultimately human actions, I don't see how they can draw a distinction between the two cases.

> How can automating a human function be illegal?

DDoS

Re: Adblock Radio: An adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts

#210

Post by aembleton »

AlexandrB wrote: post #124
ekianjo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podcast ads are extremely annoying though. They tend to repeat the same message 2 or 3 times, then spell out the name of the products as if people were dumb, and this like 5 times in an hour.

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe where podcasts either don't have ads (and are Patreon-supported) or the ads are read by the podcast hosts themselves as a humorous "bit". Which podcasts are you listening to?

The Joe Rogan Experience. I set my podcast client to skip the first 400 seconds of his shows as they are just adverts.
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