Miranda Katz:

Those numbers tend to be steady regardless of the length of the show—and according to Panoply, the few listeners who do skip ads continue to remain engaged with the episode, rather than dropping off at the first sign of an interruption.

I’m fairly shocked by this, but I don’t think it’s far off before we get podcast ad blockers. Take something like the “deepfakes” ML that places people’s faces on another persons body (usually to make porn right now, or add Nicholas Cage into movies) — that’s a much computationally harder task than learning when a podcaster is starting a stopping an ad read. It will be interesting to see which company jumps on making such an app “click play on your favorite podcast, never hear an ad”.