Show HN: Adblock for Podcasts

[jdr23bc]

This is a small app that achieves surprisingly good podcast adblocking. It transcribes the podcast, identifies ad segments in the transcript, then creates a new version of the podcast without the ads.

[clay_the_ripper]

This is something I would use - not to steal but so I could listen to certain podcasts for sleep. The host intros and ads for this certain podcast are terribly distracting from what is otherwise incredible content.

[davesmylie]

Other use case is relistening to old podcasts - about half the stuff I listen to is historical which lends itself well to a relistening 10 years later. The content may well be still relevant but the ads are surely not.

The other podcasts I listen to are current and mostly ad supported - this isn't great for them

[vsnf]

Right now someone, somewhere, is thinking of a way to use this to identify the ad portions in old podcasts and overlay new, perpetually relevant, dynamic ads.

[ephimetheus]

This is already being done. Same as geo targeting dynamically inserted ads based on the IP of the downloading client.

[wrboyce]

They use the IP! That explains why I was getting Spanish ads for a few days after returning home.

[OptionOfT]

I lived in CA and got advertisements for Ralphs. I spent some time in Sedona and all of the sudden I got the same advertisements, same jingle etc but instead of Ralphs it was Fry's. That definitely threw me off.

[crtasm]

My podcast downloader is always on an IP from another country, I don't mind the ads nearly as much when I can't understand a word they're saying!

[alexriddle]

I'm fairly sure that most podcast platforms now include dynamic ad segments - I listen to a few and whilst some (usually where the hosts record ads themselves) seem to have static ads, others definitely have ads which are updated automatically

[klondike_klive]

It's a shame - other countries' ads often strike me as quaint, hilariously awful, at best amusingly weird, and I'm willing to tolerate them to a point. But when an ad breaks in that's obviously targeted based on my location it feels ingratiating, dirty, offensive.

[vsnf]

Yeah for sure. But is it being done for the huge back catalog of much older podcasts? Maybe the big players already have teams of people hunting for old ad breaks, but this could alleviate the burden.

[Larrikin]

Not listening to ads is never stealing

[coryfklein]

Right? Every player comes with those "skip forward 30s" buttons, and surely the creators and advertisers are aware that many folks tap that button anyway.

[maxglute]

I'm hoping now that Google Podcast moved to Youtube Music which can be added to Youtube Playlist, podcast listeners are going to figure out sponsorblock applies. I wonder if that's also why a bunch of my podcasts haven't migrated to Youtube.

[camelcat]

This is great! I'd love this to be integrated into my podcast app (AntennaPod) just like Sponsorblock for YouTube.

[longitudinal93]

Thank you for AntennaPod. It's a wonderful app.

[camelcat]

Thank you for your kind words, but I'm just an enthusiastic user of the app, not the author.

[occz]

I'm not sure they actually claimed to be the author - I read it as them claiming to be a user.

[smcleod]

Nice work, I've raised a PR that adds support for local LLMs (Ollama, llama.cpp etc...) and a few other enhancements.

[draugadrotten]

The code is surprisingly short and compact. It looks as if if the classification could be adapted to extract "highlight" snippets from podcasts as well, which would be a usecase I would be interested in.

[0x2a]

Alternative using SponsorBlock for podcasts on YouTube/Vimeo:

https://github.com/mxpv/podsync

[0x2a]

Another more recent one (on-demand instead of upfront downloads):

https://github.com/ericmedina024/podcast-sponsor-block

[pixelesque]

If this uses pydub which uses ffmpeg under-the-hood, I guess it re-encodes the .mp3s rather than "losslessly" snipping out frames of audio without re-encoding?

[jdr23bc]

That's right. Also adds a fade on the ad transitions. I haven't noticed a drop in quality.

[xcavier]

Just the other day I was wishing there was a uBlock but for podcasts...

[creativenolo]

A docker image for running on a server/homelab would be super.

[mgrandl]

That is awesome! I will give it a shot :)

[Animats]

Is there one for videos?

[jjayj]

Sponsor Block for YouTube videos.

[wruza]

I find SB reporters sometimes too eager and even flagged some skips due to an incorrect category. Not that it’s a mass issue, but it has to be worked on.

Otherwise it’s fantastic.

(SB has different categories of skips. E.g. sponsor ads, self promotion/merch, like-sub-bell annoyances and so on. You choose what you skip.)

[skeaker]

The Highlight feature (a button that takes you to a community-designated timestamp right away, intended to be placed where the primary content of the video actually starts) is particularly bad about this, though I have seen it used to comedic effect. A particularly unbearably cringe video had a highlight that jumped straight to the end so you didn't have to watch it.

[interblag]

This is interesting as a technical PoC but also feels a bit unethical.

The moral case for ad blocking on the web seems pretty clear: online advertising is built on massive exploitation of user privacy, has horrible UX, and is often implemented so poorly that it tanks pageload performance. In short, I understand why people use ad blockers on the web.

Podcasts though? In RSS-based podcasting, which is what this tool targets, you're typically getting a reasonable quality audio ad, with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast; it's about as unobtrusive as advertising gets. Widespread circumvention of those ads could really hurt the ecosystem, which would be particularity frustrating given that podcasting appears to still be a viable space for small scale creators to do great things (e.g. San Charrington and the TWIML AI podcast)

TLDR cool demo but everyone should please think carefully about if or when to use this tool.

[asymmetric]

> with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast

Not so fast. Many podcasts are served by intermediaries. The same intermediary can then observe and collect an individual's listener preferences and create a more targeted profile.

The iOS podcast app Overcast shows you all the intermediary platforms a podcast goes through.

E.g. 99pi goes through Chartable, with Overcast flagging that it "may follow individual-listener behaviour across multiple shows or the web, often to track responses to ads.'

[panarky]

Is it unethical to fast-forward through ads?

How about if I turn the volume down during ads, is that morally wrong?

Maybe I play ads at regular speed and volume, but I think about something other than the ads while they play, is that wrong?

Perhaps a truly ethical consumer would listen intently to every ad, rewinding every time their mind wanders, pausing the audio every few seconds to take copious notes.

[interblag]

This sounds a bit like the fallacy of the beard; the existence of ambiguous behaviours that exist somewhere on the spectrum between "listening to an entire podcast with ads" and "automatically downloading the podcast, editing out the ads, and reuploading to a personal RSS feed so you can listen to it ad-free" shouldn't prevent us from contrasting the behaviours at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

That said, "unethical" was clearly a poor choice of words, as that's quite a loaded term. However, this technology is designed to systematically circumvent the mechanism by which many podcast creators earn money for their effort, and even if "unethical" is the wrong word, we should still discuss whether putting these technologies out, and using them, is a good move - particularly if we care about rewarding creators and supporting the podcasting industry. (And there's an argument that goes even further, around whether doing something like this is systematically violating an implicit contract with creators, even if it's more of a moral contract than a legal one).

[Altern4tiveAcc]

> we should still discuss whether putting these technologies out, and using them, is a good move - particularly if we care about rewarding creators and supporting the podcasting industry

Note that a lot of people believe that it is not only a good move, but the actually ethical one. I fail to see how the ads would benefit the users directly, and I will go out of my way to not support advertising. So far I've installed tools like uBlock Origin and Sponsor Block for tens of friends/acquaintances now, and I firmly believe they are getting a better experience.

[jjayj]

This is a space in which I still haven't fully formed an opinion (as I typed this response I realized I have an opinion, I'm just not totally sure what it is) so I welcome discussion. I hate advertising too, and use e.g. Sponsor Block, but I recognize that the majority of the modern internet would not exist without ads.

> if I turn the volume down during ads, is that morally wrong?

30 years ago, was it morally wrong to go to the bathroom during an ad break? (IMO: no)

> I think about something other than the ads while they play, is that wrong?

30 years ago, was it wrong to chat with friends during a commercial break? (IMO: no)

That being said, _skipping_ the ads entirely doesn't seem (to me) equivalent to these examples.

I cannot explain why I feel this way. I _think_ I still believe in _unobtrusive_ advertising - 5 to 15 seconds of ads before a 10 minute video.

If the author of our favorite podcast can't get any product placement in, why will they continue producing the podcast? (Maybe in a utopia they would create the podcast because that's what they love to do - but maybe in a utopia they would prefer not to cast, and instead listen to someone else?)

Idk. Some thought vomit here that maybe HN folks can help me work through.

[0x2a]

You're not obligated to listen to an ad anymore than you are obligated to buy an advertised product.

Creators will still get paid per download with this tool. If everyone does something like this (unlikely), worst case is conversion rates might be lower, which could cause advertising to become less financially viable, so content creators may have to explore other monetization options or add more advertising.

Removing ads from a podcast that offers a paid ad-free alternative feels wrong, but aside from that I don't see anything wrong with this. I'll always choose a paid version over ads.

Video/audio ads (especially TV commercial breaks) seem inherently obtrusive to me. They're hard to skip, and rarely contextual. I personally think listening to ads is generally harmful, there are better sources of information to be influenced by to make a decision.

An unobtrusive ad would imo be more like putting a link in the description, or a privacy-respecting banner on the website. I'm sure that wouldn't pay as well, though.

[portaouflop]

I get your point but removing advertising is never unethical.

[pixxel]

Advertising doesn’t work on me. I fast-forward through ads. I never sit and listen to them. Ever. Am I unethical?

[Terr_]

> Advertising doesn’t work on me.

I think there's a preponderance of scientific evidence to show that there's probably some kind of effect on you as a member of homo sapiens, even if it's not necessarily conscious or not exactly as strong as advertisers claim it is to their clients.

For example, would you say you are immune to the Mere-exposure Effect [0]? Absent some particular gripe, you'll unconsciously give an edge in preferences to a brand you've heard about versus one you haven't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

[phito]

Thinking that ads don't work on one's self has to be some sort of Dunning-Kruger effect

[cess11]

Do you have other feelings that you consider important enough that they should cause me to think carefully about something?

If your media contains parts that you needed to be convinced by money to insert I'll probably skip it entirely, for me it's a signal that the material is produced for other reasons than your interests and passion, and there are many other people that don't make such compromises. Some of them put a price on the material, some don't. I might be willing to make a deal with you, but I do not want to be pulled into your deals with third parties.

[jdr23bc]

Good points! I agree using this to bypass a reasonable paid ad-free option is dubious.

In Canada the CBC's tax-funded podcasts with ads also feel a little dubious.

It'd be cool if you could have an personal AI purchase and curate content for you.

Edit: thinking a bit more about it I guess that's pretty much what YouTube premium is.

[askl]

Does it matter if I actually listen to the ad if there isn't anything that's tracking if I do? It shouldn't hurt the podcasters revenue.

I'm not getting a hellofresh subscription anyways even if I hear an ad for it.

[jjayj]

My completely ignorant and uninformed opinion:

If the vast majority of folks started skipping ads, and ads thus no longer had reasonable conversion rates, companies would stop investing in podcast ads and many podcasts would stop being produced.

[wruza]

Probably, but subj has zero chance to ever serve vast majority. It’s a tool for people who’d never buy anything from ads either way and know what a local server is. No real ethics issues here.

[jjayj]

I feel that the vast majority of folks would claim they'll 'never buy anything from ads'. Isn't one of the main benefits of advertising purely brand recognition?

I'm unsure how I feel about the 'zero chance to ever serve vast majority' argument. I use uBlock and Sponsor Block, but recognize that that has an impact at scale. I guess that argument kind of feels to me like "your single vote doesn't matter." For a few hundred or thousand folks, sure. But what if 500k people start using it?

[Terr_]

> The moral case for ad blocking on the web seems pretty clear

Also ad-networks as an unaccountable vector for malware.

That said, I agree that audio in a podcast doesn't have that same problem, outside of a Snow Crash scenario.

[phito]

Ads are unethical.

[noirscape]

I'd say the easiest comparison is that it'd be about as ethical as taking a VHS recording of a TV program and skipping through the old ad breaks.

Personally I don't see an issue with that; but even if you do, I'll also note that the overwhelming majority of companies that rely on Podcast/influencer ads in general have utter shite quality products. It's one thing to get a traditional radio ad break telling you about the current supermarket sales, it's another to hear the fiftieth VPN ad who is totally about convincing you that they're just for watching Netflix overseas, the twentieth food delivery company, bad earbuds manufacturers or shite like razor delivery companies and cast iron BBQ grills. To put it quite simply; there's a reason these companies aren't pursuing more traditional avenues and it's probably because they'd get undesired scrutiny if they did.

There are of course outliers, but the amount of false advertising for shoddy products compared to actually desirable shit is so low that the bar is below the floor.

[fnordian_slip]

Why do so many comments see not listening to / viewing ads as immoral?

Even if this will become the new norm, and there are fewer advertisers and people would make less money from it, this change could be very positive for the podcast ecosystem. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and the majority are without ads or rarely include ads. They are products of passion, and not full of fake testimonials about scammy expensive multivitamins or really bad mental health services.

Imho, the web was a lot better before Google and social media ruined the discoverability of small personal websites and blogs with great content, and replaced it with (nowadays AI-generated) blogspam and clickbait that is highly profitable, but ultimately worthless.

We will not return to the good old times with the web. In fact I believe that the genie is not only out of the bottle, but we actually created an automated Pandora's-box-opener in the current state of AI, compete with endless unboxing videos. But maybe we can go one step back with podcasts. I believe it would be worth a try.

[nolongerthere]

How intensive is this to run? Could it be set to run automatically for each new podcast that gets added to the original feed?

[jdr23bc]

On an M3 15 minutes of podcasts takes about 1 minute of processing. The transcription is the slow part.

[shoulderfake]

gods work

[andrewstuart]

I don't get it. You want the podcast, you value the work, you don't want them paid?

[INTPenis]

I wish there was a reality where content creators understood that ads just don't work on some people. I understand that they need money, and I listen to the ads when I can't fast-forward through them, but it's a complete waste of time on me.

And I do have a desire to block ads in every single part of my life, I just don't practically go any further than regular uBlock origin in Firefox.

I'd actually rather pay for good podcasts than get intrusive ads.

[noirscape]

Sponsorship money is to my understanding pretty much always paid beforehand; the marketer gives a sum of money and just for doing the ad read, the podcaster gets paid.

Actual payment on clickthrough/conversion rate is pretty uncommon. The podcaster isn't harmed by anyone skipping the ads.

[rPlayer6554]

The more people that use this, the less that ads will be worth.

[pragmatick]

Why wouldn't they get paid? You download the whole episode, it's not different than downloading it to your phone. They don't know if you listened to the ad any more than if listening via an app without this step inbetween.

[klunger]

Exactly. If you are going to use this, I believe you should also become a patron* of the podcasts you do it to. And, in that case, you often have access to an ad-free version anyway.

*or "tip" or whatever other monetization channel they have. Very few rely solely on ads.

[shortformblog]

Ding ding ding.

A lot of podcast authors offer ad-free versions as a paid feed to members, which to me, invalidates the ethically dubious “but the podcaster has already been paid” argument.

They should be given the choice to do this.

I feel like the slippery slope is immensely dangerous as it always is with these products.

[skeaker]

How do you feel about just fast forwarding past the ads in your audio player? Is that unethical too?

[AlexeyBelov]

Cue silence.

[shortformblog]

Because there's nothing to say really.

[AlexeyBelov]

How about answering the question? I don't see why not do that and instead reply to my comment.

[AlexeyBelov]

Don't they have a day job?