[simias]

I agree that making money by effectively making it harder for the original content creators to make money is not super ethical in my book and as such I'd refuse to use such an app.

That being said:

>If we do stuff like this, the podcast industry will switch to a closed system which would require you to install proprietary apps to listen to stuff. Likely several different apps for different shows and companies.

You can dismiss all adblockers that way. Except it's not really how it'll work: if people really make it inconvenient to access the content people will pirate instead. Podcasts are also generally small audio files which makes them super easy to share.

Instead I think that blocking ads (which, IMO, are a cancer for our society and I have no moral or ethical problem blocking everywhere) will incentivize podcasters to find alternative schemes to make money. For instance you could have a "Spotify for podcasts" that lets you watch podcasts ad-free with a subscription. There actually already are a few services for that (Stitcher comes to mind). I actually pay for a Stitcher subscription to listen to my podcasts ad-free.

I want to believe in a future version of the internet where everybody and their dog aren't spending their entire resources conning me into watching ads I don't want to see.