[obenn]

The only caveat to this is their insight into advertisements. Lets say a podcast runs ads during its first 5 minutes, they can now tell exactly how many people are listening or skipping those ads and may be incentivized to start putting ads in the middle of podcasts, or implement some sort of non skip-able interruption.

[Tracist]

Exactly my thoughts. I'm currently using a different podcast app that has a neat "fast forward 30 seconds" feature that I only ever use to skip ads.

It's annoying enough having to get my phone out of my pocked to press the fast forward button. If the ads were unskippable, I'd switch apps immediately.

[janekm]

Or they can make the ads less annoying. For the most part NPR podcasts are pretty good for having "not worth skipping" ads that are a few seconds long.