When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.
I remember listening to an episode of Better Offline a buddy sent me and anyone who knows about Ed knows that basically half his crusade is against bad AI implementation/“slop”/etc. He’s broadly against the current LLM rush.
First ad when I fired up the podcast episode was yet aother injected ad for yet another AI agent company as generic as the rest. Literally the organizations he’s railing against and calling wasteful. It was clearly because he handed off the advertising to one of these injection services.
Sidebar: these ads tend to perform terribly. Actual ad reads by the host(s) are the only thing that lead to meaningful conversions in podcasts.
Yes, but those are dynamic too: if you go back and download old episodes, for example, you'll get the current run of ads.
https://podcastindex.org/apps podcasting 2.0 app index.
It's just an mp3 file!
edit: I should point out that i pitched, to Apple, the ability to dynamically insert ads sometime around ipod 5th gen, 2005-2006, but not for podcasts, but for downloadable videos, like "last night's TV show". I'm sorry i did this. I don't mean i had the idea and said "hey this is an idea", i had the entire infrastructure documented, it was drop in and go. Whoops.
DAI is a thing and my initial point several comments ago was that too many podcasts implement it, let advertisers drop their stuff in (not their own read), and never check what’s actually being run on their show. That’s all my point was about.