Is there a sponsor block situation for Podcasts?

i would start listening to podcasts again if something like this existed.

I would love this too.

Right now I use Pocket Casts which lets you set a specific time to skip at the beginning or end of a podcast. Useful for static ads but not for the dynamic ones throughout the show.

I also use Pocket Casts ..and I just skip the ads manually. I set the skip forward time to 30 seconds and I set skip back to 10, makes it pretty easy to hop past them.
- This is exactly what I do now. But skipping ahead and back is tough when I'm listening while cooking and have raw chicken on my hands.
- Same, though I did 30s forward and 17s back. The asymmetric skip has been really helpful.

Podcasts are yet one more thing that ads have more or less ruined for me. I rarely listen to them due to the sponsorships. It is like trying to watch YouTube on my TV through the YouTube app instead of the Smarttube app.

Man I love that app so much it really leveled up my TV YouTube experience especially with sponsorblock built in
Would you pay for them? I mean these are usually just people making them not giant corporations. How do they make money.
- If the price was what I deemed acceptable and the method of doing so was decently centralized. I’m not going to sign up to 15 different podcasts with 15 separate transactions every month.
  
  So yes, I would pay for them if they make it attractive to pay for. Ultimately the viability of their business model is not my problem. So even if it is one guy in his garage, it is on him to create something I would be willing to pay for. If they can’t then oh well I can easily do without their podcast.

None that I've found has anything close to SponsorBlock for youtube, in theory it could work, even SponsorBlock has open issue for it.

The problem is, a lot of podcasts are using dynamic ads insertion, which means the ads are added on the fly when user download an episode. Ads length could be different from person to person, and there's a possibility of empty slot too, where the podcast unable to sell the slot. "We'll be back after this short message," and jump straight into the next segment. No ad.

I suppose the solution would be having people tag a soundbite at the beginning and at the end of each ad slot. Then when the app "hears", the beginning soundbite it can just skip forward until it finds the ending one.
- I like this idea. It crowdsources the "fingerprint" of the ads themselves. So as more and more people get the same exact ad, and then tag it, it would be easier to skip that one. So it would reduce the same annoying ads from playing in, this Lemmy post is brought to you by BetterHelp talk to real live therapists about your podcast woes now, the middle of what you are focusing on. If it got big it would make advertisers change their format, but that would be good, less of the canned ads and maybe something more organic and less jarring.
I have noticed the Dynamic ads are audibly different in many ways. Like higher volume or has music added. I wonder if we could use that to auto detect the ads and skip it?
- Idk everybody's situation, but I just listen like this and manually skip ads. My car has buttons on the steering wheel for forward and backward (if I skip back into the podcast). My earbuds skip forward and backward with double presses on the right and left earbud respectively. Listening otherwise, it's not that hard for me to grab my phone and skip through a few minutes of ads. Would it be better if it were automatic? Sure. But I'm much more annoyed by YouTube ads popping up every 3-7 minutes.
for dai, I suggest using ad blocking DNS like adguard. not perfect but it's easy and painless.
The problem is, a lot of podcasts are using dynamic ads insertion, which means the ads are added on the fly when user download an episode. Ads length could be different from person to person, and there's a possibility of empty slot too, where the podcast unable to sell the slot. "We'll be back after this short message," and jump straight into the next segment. No ad.

Omg that explains why I got an ad in my native language in Adam Conover's podcast
Man I hate this new dynamic and insertion bs. For 15 years all the podcasts I listened to had host-read ads. And in most cases, I had enormous trust in the podcaster to choose companies that he was willing to stand behind. I've used products I first heard about on a host-read podcast as before, and never regretted it.

But in the last 12 months I've been getting dynamically inserted ads a lot more. Partly because those older podcasts are using them to supplement income as advertisers are less willing to buy host-read ads than they once were (a lack of data and targeting when buying a podcast ad spot is the biggest factor, but also laziness on the part of marketing managers because host-read ads need to be negotiated and bought individually, rather than making single big buys in automated insertion systems), but mostly because I've started listening to a few newer podcasts that weren't around in the heyday of podcasting.

And it really sucks. More and more it's feeling like the podcasting industry is being enshittified, not even because of the desires of podcasters themselves, but thanks to advertisers hating the idea that podcast ads were more like TV ads than internet banner ads/YouTube preroll video ads, and thanks to big businesses like Spotify coming into the audio content market. (N.B., it's very important to remember that what Spotify does is not podcasting. By definition if it's delivered via a proprietary service rather than the open RSS standard, it is not podcasting.)

I just unsubscribe when it becomes too prominent. There was a guy doing a recap of the news of the day in 5 minutes. Suddenly added 2 minutes of ads. Fuck that

This is not a solution. It's like when there are too many ads on a site, stop using the site instead of just using an adblocker. Eventually I won't be able to listen to any podcasts with this "solution".

I wish there was. I listen to this particular podcast that has the same sponsor for years and they do make it much more entertaining than the average podcast, but I still find myself manually skipping it every time I sense it coming. And because they make it more part of the conversation, the ad moment lasts for minutes each episode, so I'm sure every regular listener had enough of that.

Not quite what you’re looking for, but Overcast has Skip Intro and Skip Outro features. For each show, you can set an amount of time for the app to automatically skip over at the beginning and end of each episode. I find it super useful for some shows

Podcast Addict as well (also has skip silence)

Antennapod lets you customize how far your fast forward button skips ahead.

But every ad on every episode of every podcast can be different. Right now with pocket cast, I skip ahead 30 seconds at a time then go back 10 seconds. But I'd rather automate it
- Saaaame. Only thing I can think of is a server to download the podcasts, then some kind of ML/AI/LLM chicanery to transcribe, ID and timestamp the sponsor segments? Then chop it out with ffmpeg?
  
  Edit: looks like Podgrab can download the files, the rest might be doable with a bit of scripting.
You can also set for each podcasts a skip intro and outro time.
Hm! I look forward to trying Antennapod or pocketcasts since Gpodcasts is getting the Google Funeral treatment. :( Thanks for the likely superior alternatives.
- Pocket Casts also has these features.

I desperately want this as well.

I use podcast addicts' auto slip feature. Most podcasts I listen to have a set ad of a set length at the start or end. You can set an auto slip on a per subscription basis. Works for me

I wish this existed. I figure it's a matter of time before someone develops a ML solution.

I usually just try to hunt down bootleg feeds. I can usually find one, or a Patreon feed that someone has shared.

Just posted this in another thread, it's not implemented yet but TubeArchivist has a podcast mode on their roadmap: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

Extremely interested in this as well, i might need to start learning android development now ;)

I think the only reasonable way to do that would be using AI since the sponsors are placed randomly throughout usually. Unless you listen to a specific podcast and they do same length of sponsor in same time slot every video you could automate something that cuts it out.

Sponsorblock does this with just regular I, not AI. E.G. crowdsourcing the sponsored segments
Crowd sourcing works great. First person marks it, everyone else gets to enjoy it without the ads.

On top of dynamic ads, another problem would be decentralisation of podcasts. Many of them are released on several platforms simultaneously, and some sort of extra work would be needed for this to work accordingly independent of where you're listening to a particular podcast.

Because a lot of podcast networks have dynamically inserted ads that change based on your geolocation, I've found that my Pihole can often provide a feed without any ads. I assume it's like a fallback in case the geolocating fails. So I set Pocketcasts to only download episodes on my home network.

I have pihole and I still get ads when I stream from home
Can you prove any more info on this? Is the pihole automatically stopping the ads from downloading? It sound like it's at least a partial solution.
- So without having looked into it really, my assumption is that these podcast hosts will serve a specific file based on the response to an API call. If my Pihole blocks that call, they don't want to serve nothing, so they fallback to a file that sometimes has "generic" ads (often for US-based companies) or other times no ads at all. Of course this doesn't work for all podcasts, and as mentioned sometimes still has ads anyway. One day I might look more closely into it.

The podcasts I listen to, very larely have sponsors during the episode, what are you guys listening to?

Different podcasts
- You don't say it!

I used to use WeCast, it had a community driven block much like sponsorblock. But it was a long time ago, I couldn't find it on Google Play so I don't know if it's still active.

I didn’t even know podcast ads were a thing, you learn something new every day. Good luck! I hope you are able to find something, fuck ads!

All I can say is that I listen to Huberman's podcasts on FreeTube and God bless the people who sponsorblock his videos.

I use a cracked spotify app on my phone, and tend to manually skip through with the lock screen buttons.

"Hey Siri, fast forward two minutes"

Seriously. You could spend 3 days researching some half-assed solution or can just hit the skip-15-seconds button.

Idk what do you listen to, but when I listen to hour long podcast, I don't care about 30 seconds sponsor. That's not helpful, I know.

That’s a pretty reasonable ad load. Have you listened to 99% Invisible lately? Each episode is about 10 minutes long, and it seems like at least 50% of it is now ads and sponsorship stuff.
- Doesn't sound like a worthwhile podcast then.
- Stitcher/SiriusXM has absolutely wrecked that podcast. I don't know if Roman knew what he was getting into when he sold, but I've either lost a lot of faith in his wisdom if he didn't or in his scruples if he did.