It's not like the client app is inserting them.
I mean, I guess I can imagine an exceptionally-scummy podcast app, but that's not what we're talking about here.
at a certain point, one has to ask themselves if whatever media they're ingesting is worth the scum.
These ads are not just not baked into the audio file, they are legitimately a mystery to the people running the show sometimes. And I think that that’s kind of unconscionable tbh. Podcasts (especially early on) owe a lot of their success to the feeling of “authenticity,” they feel more personal and less “corporate” generally. Whether that’s reality or not we can of course debate, but it’s how audiences perceived them. The reason on air reads have been generally successful for podcasts is because of the trust between the podcast and the audience that has been built over time. This runs directly counter to it.