Two trends are happening across podcasting which are absolutely obliterating the listener experience.

Both are related, and I assume are the result of the publishers, not necessarily the podcaster themselves, trying to hit revenue and engagement targets.

Ad overload

First, simply too many ads. I’m not talking “podcaster reads ad” moments; I’m talking about pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads that are simply egregious in quantity.

Podcasts produced by iHeart Podcasts (at least the ones I have subscribed to) are particularly bad at this.

I don’t mind listening to a few ads to support a publisher or podcaster, but when there are literally more ads than content per episode, well, you’re being very disrespectful of my time, and very much overvaluing what your content is worth.

I love Ed Zitron’s show “Better Offline”, but when the ratio of ad playtime to content is 1:1, it might be time to drop it from my morning walk or run (I’m old, so it depends on the day).

In fairness to Ed, he’s not the one doing this. These ads are programmatically added to each download of the original podcast; you may not get the same result as I did, and trying to verify this, I actually got a different result in the online version of Pocket Casts than on my phone. The “episode” length was 4 minutes and 7 seconds shorter.

Long story short, yesterday’s episode of Better Offline (on my phone) had 3 minutes and 37 seconds of pre-roll ads, and 3 minutes and 50 seconds of post-roll ads. 7 minutes and 23 seconds of ads programmatically superglued onto about 7 minutes and 41 seconds of podcast.

Yeah, no.

Episode Fracturing

Next up is a daft trend I’m seeing with broadcasters breaking up their 10-20 minute news show into multiple 2-5 minute parts that all go out together on the same feed.

I’m going to guess this was a “genius idea” by somebody in the marketing department that has no idea how podcasts, or more specifically podcast clients, work.

To be honest, they probably thought, “short-form content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, let’s do that to our podcast audio”, with the hopes of running more ads and getting more engagement.

Well, it doesn’t work like that, Oppenheimer.

Podcast clients check a show’s RSS feed for updates and usually only queue the latest, or at most, the last two episodes of a podcast.

Anything beyond that requires the listener to whip out their phone and actually go digging for what are considered old episodes by the client.

Most people don’t just listen to one podcast, and podcast clients are generally designed to queue up the latest episodes from your subscriptions and play them back, moving from one show to the other until the listener is caught up.

Ideally, this occurs without the listener touching their device, because they are actively engaged in other activities like exercising, driving, or trying to survive yet another existential crisis.

Cutting up your 15-minute news show into 4 separate “mini episodes” that all go out in the feed together doesn’t boost engagement or increase ad plays, simply because most people will miss 2 or more of the episodes because their app will skip right over them.