My completely ignorant and uninformed opinion:
If the vast majority of folks started skipping ads, and ads thus no longer had reasonable conversion rates, companies would stop investing in podcast ads and many podcasts would stop being produced.
Probably, but subj has zero chance to ever serve vast majority. It’s a tool for people who’d never buy anything from ads either way and know what a local server is. No real ethics issues here.
I feel that the vast majority of folks would claim they'll 'never buy anything from ads'. Isn't one of the main benefits of advertising purely brand recognition?
I'm unsure how I feel about the 'zero chance to ever serve vast majority' argument. I use uBlock and Sponsor Block, but recognize that that has an impact at scale. I guess that argument kind of feels to me like "your single vote doesn't matter." For a few hundred or thousand folks, sure. But what if 500k people start using it?
I'm not getting a hellofresh subscription anyways even if I hear an ad for it.