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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

#221

Post by _bxg1 »

shadofx wrote: post #219
_bxg1 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>just die altogether Sounds good. I preferred when websites existed as a result of a person's individual passion on a particular topic, not the network of fake news clickbait vying for attention that we have now.

So you'd like online journalism to just die off because they can't figure out how to get money from the people who benefit from their work?

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

#222

Post by cwkoss »

buboard wrote: post #213
cwkoss wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nah , ad-supported media are invariably more diverse. Fear of offending subscribers leads to much more self-censorship

Ad supported media tends to be much more "clickbaity", and I don't think self-censorship to avoid offending corporations is healthy for society.

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

#223

Post by the_watcher »

Nextgrid wrote: post #11
Tepix wrote: post #7

I think the podcasts i listen to will not work, the moderators speak the ads themselves. Luckily it‘s easy to skip ahead 15 seconds at a time. At least ads in podcasts cannot track me so i don‘t feel i have to block them for that reason alone.

There's a thing called "server side ad injection" (more like cancer injection) that inserts arbitrary ads directly in the audio stream so the ad is independent from the original producer. Presumably they do some rudimentary tracking based on IPs, user-agent and whether your podcast client downloaded the file past the point where the ad is injected.

I'm fine with podcast ads because I want the excellent podcasts I enjoy to continue existing. That said, I cannot stand injected ads, since they're often injected in awkward places and are jarring to the experience. I'll (not exactly happily but not angrily) listen to a live read where the podcaster has at least taken the time to try not to destroy the flow of the entire podcast.

All that said, the best ads (from a listener experience POV) are the extremely short, to the point ads that are honestly too short to put the effort into skipping. Planet Money (and the NPR podcasts I listen to in general) does this well. I'm curious what their CPMs are relative to a typical ad.

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

#224

Post by bduerst »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a closer look at that feeling. If you're not comfortable with what they're trying to do, but also not comfortable with trying to mitigate it, as it'll only incentivize them to do worse - then how comfortable are you with them existing? The problem is ad distribution companies here and now. The problem won't be gone until they're gone.

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.

>The problem is people are willing to pay for certain products with their attention, via ads, but not with money.

This sounds like projection - are there any numbers or data to back this up? Because the market shows that people prefer to get things for free, either subsidized with ads or by ad blocking.

Google also tried this with contributor.google.com but they shut it down due to lack of interest.

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

#225

Post by driverdan »

imglorp wrote: post #168
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?

I'd like to give a shout out to one pod caster in particular that might be of interest to this audience: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com There are ads, but they are spoken by the host in his normal tone. No loudness tricks, just one minute reading the copy. I suppose OP's tool won't detect this unless a human tags all the spots. Second, the ads are focused to the audience and may actually be useful sometimes: ho…

You just described most podcast ads. The majority are read by the host(s) and are target at the audience. It doesn't make them better.

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

#226

Post by jccalhoun »

amrrs wrote: post #41
dest wrote: post #3

Hello, author of Adblock Radio here. Thanks for posting this. I can answer questions if you have any. You can read more on the context of this project in this article: https://www.adblockradio.com/blog/2018/11/15/designing-audio...

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?

They get money on downloads so they have no idea whether i listen to the ad, skip through them manually, or use this.

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

#227

Post by charliesome »

_bxg1 wrote: post #202
chmln wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's a few community radio stations in my home city. They play good music, support local musicians and local venues, and are largely funded by voluntary memberships. This membership gets you a bumper sticker and a good feeling.

Contrast this to the commercial radio stations which allocate a huge proportion of their airtime to annoying, dishonest, manipulative ads employing all sorts of shady tactics (like those discussed elsewhere in this comments thread) to try to part me with my money.

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

#228

Post by tudelo »

dest wrote: post #77
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?

My dream would be that people that are fine with ads should have them, while people against should be able to subscribe to the content. Like Spotify actually, but radio does not offer that.

Is this sustainable?

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

#229

Post by iamstupidsimple »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #175
iamstupidsimple wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But podcast ads are not targetting nor using my cookie or phone id. You say that, but there are products to allow dynamically insert personalised ads server side when you download a podcast.

Podcasts are RSS feeds. Not "like" RSS feeds, literally RSS feeds. There are are dynamic ad inserts on some (usually from bigger companies), but they're limited to GeoIP and time. The OP is absolutely correct in that podcast ads cannot use cookies or device IDs. This is in large part why we're starting to see companies make "podcasts" that aren't podcasts at all, requiring proprietary players. At that point they real…

I fail to see how RSS feeds can't still use cookies? Once you've got a cookie then the feed can easily add tracking links or a unique mp3 file with personalised ads inserted. It's trivial to do this with a web server.

Edit: This assumes using a web browser to access the feeds. Obviously cookies won't be kept with an app.

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

#230

Post by _bxg1 »

charliesome wrote: post #227
_bxg1 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a few community radio stations in my home city. They play good music, support local musicians and local venues, and are largely funded by voluntary memberships. This membership gets you a bumper sticker and a good feeling. Contrast this to the commercial radio stations which allocate a huge proportion of their airtime to annoying, dishonest, manipulative ads employing all sorts of shady tactics (like those di…

Sure, those sound great, but that's not a subscription, that's a donation. And sustaining something via donations requires a huge confluence of people caring about something all at the same time with single-minded intentionality. It's fantastic when it works out, but it's far from being something you can just prescribe as a solution. People are finnicky, and without a unifying ethos this model simply isn't realistic in the general case.

This is the biggest strength of government-organized public spending, by the way. Some people say private organizations - when you include nonprofits - can accomplish anything a government can. And that's true in theory, but in practice certain things don't work at all unless everyone's on the exact same page. And turns out it's really hard getting everyone on the exact same page. So democracy says "we're going to vote on what that exact same page is, but then we're all going to act as a single unit no matter how we individually feel about the decision". Some things can only work that way.

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