Ads in podcasts

[Fenneccharles]

On android, app up to date as of 9/11/2024. 

I have been listening to podcasts on Spotify for years, and while I haven't listened to one in a while, this is the first I have ever experienced an ad significantly disrupting my podcast. It's one thing if the host of the podcast reads a sponsorship, I get that, but I don't pay for the premium plan for Spotify themselves to suddenly inject regular ads as they would if I was not paying for them to remove ads. Is this an intended change, to remove customers ability to not have ads on any plan regardless of price point? If so, what is the point of paying to remove ads? 

[Maxim]

Hey @Fenneccharles,

Thanks for coming to the Community.

Spotify advertises that a Premium user can listen to music without ad interruptions (as can be seen here), which is one of the key benefits of a Premium subscription. However, podcasts for both free and Premium users may include ads, and they can be either host-read endorsements, sponsorships or audio adverts within the podcast track itself.

A special feature is available that can dynamically insert ads within a podcast stream. This can be enabled or disabled by the podcast publishers. The desire here is to provide some added value for those who want to host their podcasts on Spotify.

The teams at Spotify understand that there might be some confusion on the fact that Premium comes with ad free music listening, but doesn't cover podcasts.

Hopefully this explanation provides you with a better understanding of the Premium subscription and the ads that you listened to. Apologies if this was not made sufficiently clear before.

Spotify cares about their users' opinion and they're doing their best to expand on the information sources available to be more transparent. 🙂

[cmitch96]

Just so I understand, you're saying individual podcast publishers are choosing to implement the feature you guys built to allow them to inject ads into their content on Spotify? Because I've listened to the same podcasts on other platforms, and they feature fewer ads at fewer times.

[Fenneccharles]

Premium or not, regular unskippable ads, AND ad reads, are not the standard on most podcast platforms. Why are any Spotify users being subjected to 2-3x more ads than anywhere else? How does that do anything but discourage users to listen on Spotify? I will never listen to another podcast on Spotify again, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. I will keep paying for premium for the music, but if Spotify wants people to listen to podcasts (which they absolutely do because they have been a loss overall) what is the point of driving customers away from your platform entirely?