I'd be interested to see stats on how often people skip over the ads during a podcast. I admit I do occasionally, but most of the time when I'm listening to a podcast I'm simultaneously doing something - like driving, exercising, mowing the lawn - that makes it inconvenient open my phone, navigate to to the app, and press the skip button a few times. Coupled with the fact that the adds are generally not too long, I don't find it to be too intrusive to the episode.

It’s probably one of the best features having an Apple Watch: flick of the wrist, couple of taps, bye bye ad. If I had to pick up my phone, I probably wouldn’t skip the ads, either.

Depending on your podcast player, what would be "next track" in a music app is "skip N seconds." I double tap my headphones and skip the ad.

It doesn't work in the basic Apple podcasts app, but that app stinks and Pocket Casts is now free to use.

Oops, sorry; yeah, I forgot to specify the app being Overcast. Though without firing up the machinery to confirm, I believe on the watch it's just using Apple's Now Playing? Or maybe not. Anyway, to be specific, on the Apple watch there are buttons on either side of play/pause; one goes back 30 seconds, one goes forward.

Overcast is an interesting case study on optimizing for listeners vs. creators.

The app developer, Marco Arment, is also co-host of Accidental Tech Podcast. One cool feature in Overcast is chapter markers: You can embed ID3v2 chapter frames in your RSS feed's MP3 files indicating when different segments start. This lets the listener jump between segments, it's a pretty slick experience.

Unsurprisingly, ATP uses this functionality. Advertising chapters are labelled as such, but the timecodes are always deliberately skewed so that skipping to the next chapter after an ad still gives you the last 15 seconds or so of the ad read.

I suppose this is a slightly better user experience than disabling the Skip Next button altogether on an ad segment, but it still irks me to be on the losing end of a conflict of interest.

...says the guy (me) complaining about a free podcast being played in a free podcast app.

Even as I typed my follow-up, I was thinking, "ya know, I wouldn't put it past Arment to just replicate the Now Playing UI and then season to taste." So, yeah, bad example.

a free podcast app

Arment's attention to little details is one of the reasons I <cough> paid whatever trivial amount he wants for an app I use daily. ;-)

Does anything besides Overcast actually respond to chapter markers?

...says the guy (me) writing a self-hostable podcast platform.

Apparently I was wrong about how podcast chapters are embedded: It's not in the RSS feed itself but encoded as ID3v2 tags in the MP3 file.

Apple Podcasts added support in iOS 12, here's a Google Sheet of the rest: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c2L14UVH1xtN4iDG4awh...

Dunno about the watch, but in Pocket Casts +30 works with CarPlay and my car's physical controls.

I think that's one of the reasons NPR bought Pocket Casts - to get this data. Where are users skipping? When are they dropping out of a podcast? Etc.

Personally I skip forward past ads all the time.

I have half a mind to write a podcast player that skips ads for me. It doesn't feel like an insurmountable problem.

Should always have access to the volume or mute/unmute button. Then give yourself 15 seconds of silence. Check if ad is still going and if so give yourself another 15 seconds of silence. Recollect your thoughs during the silence.

The next button on my steering wheel maps through bluetooth to skip ahead in my podcast app. So even driving isn't immune.

Yeah, agreed. They don't seem as unwelcome as other ad forms.

What podcasts do you listen to? I’ve never encountered one with advertisements. Well I guess hardcore history does. But the rest don’t, they’re all on Patreon.

App idea:

Community-run data API for podcasts that people mark the beginning and end of audio ads. This way most of the community can skip them.

This already exists for YouTube videos (it's called SponsorBlock). It is available as a browser extension that skips them automatically for you.

I think it would be harder with podcasts because of the diversity of available podcast players.

Dynamic Ad Insertion wreaks havoc with this. Podcast eps can have different lengths and segments can have different start times depending on the ad profile of the listener.

And that's just at a single point in time: It's not uncommon for episodes to be re-edited and re-uploaded, or ads to be changed up (with different lengths) over time.

i miss analog buttons so much...