Privacy

31981 readers

250 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Why do podcasts have preroll ads now? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by cralder@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

56 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I don't know when this started but I noticed it for the first time a few months ago. Some podcasts will have preroll ads that are obviously tailored to me since they are not in the same language as the podcast, instead they are in my native language and if I connect to a VPN in another country the ad will change to one from that country. They also seem to appear regardless of podcast app. I have used both AntennaPod and Spotify. AntennaPod is free so I guess they source their podcasts from some third party website that could be adding in the ads. But since I am paying for Spotify I am expecting not to have to listen to any ads. So who is adding in these ads? Can I get rid of them or am I just stuck with them?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 month ago

Podcasts partner up with ad providers. They inject ads into the episodes depending on several factors, including your location. The podcast has some say and can for example exclude some topics like politics. That catches most, but an ad can also be misrepresented and slip through.

I use Antennapod as well and they have nothing to do with it. They just download episodes from RSS feeds provided from other services.

You could use a VPN server in a smaller country. If the ad market is very small, there simply might be no ads to serve you.

I can also recommend using a swiss VPN server. The funny swiss dialect makes it hilarious.