My guess as to the "why" is that it's just another example of enshittification. Podcasts were essentially a bubble that everyone was trying to get in on, but the amount of low quality (not just production but also content) flooding the market devalued it significantly and listeners and subscriptions began declining. Everyone is trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of it now, which means there are even more ads on top of all the ads and cross-promotion that come baked into an episode.

I always ditch a podcast the second i hear an ad or something that resembles paid sponsored content. Fuck that, I'll pay them if I find the quality worth it, ads are cancer.

Podcasts partner up with ad providers. They inject ads into the episodes depending on several factors, including your location. The podcast has some say and can for example exclude some topics like politics. That catches most, but an ad can also be misrepresented and slip through.

I use Antennapod as well and they have nothing to do with it. They just download episodes from RSS feeds provided from other services.

You could use a VPN server in a smaller country. If the ad market is very small, there simply might be no ads to serve you.

I can also recommend using a swiss VPN server. The funny swiss dialect makes it hilarious.

Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I'm old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I've had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don't always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I'm going to be out , or if I'm mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven't tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.

It is very hard to maintain the profitability of a podcast. To get around adblockers, many podcasters have taken to editing the ads into the podcast before the podcast is uploaded to any platform. I suspect this may be the case for some of the instances you mention. These ads are not added by Spotify or any third party. The podcaster either does a sponsored ad-read or receives the audio/video for the ad from a sponsor and adds it to the podcast in post. Not much you can do at that point other than watch the cast on YouTube and use SponsorBlock.

Give us a link to the rss feed and let's investigate. I'm not experiencing this.

I hope some day AI will be incorporated into a podcast player to be able to know the difference between an add and the podcast and automatically skip all adds. Finally, there would be a good use for AI :)

I just started listening to Ostium recently and one of the episodes was around 20 minutes long, but the first 11 were commercials. It was infuriating.

I listen to quite a few different podcasts via AntennaPod and have never listened to an ad that wasn't from the podcast itself. Maybe it's due to my DNS settings or luck of the draw?

They have a github thread for it https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/4159

I am developing a podcast app and I can't prevent it either