I have the same feeling as the author about podcasts, and i'm particularly interested in the podcast ad model. While i despise exposure to advertising, I find myself not minding podcast adverts quite as much. There is also a much greater chance that the podcaster will only accept ads that their audience would be plausibly interested in and that are not outright scams (contrasting greatly with big tech-controlled ads). On top of this, you can still simply just skip the ads if you want by fast-forwarding.

I think that the key to this model working is that the podcasters are not (necessarily) reliant on big tech. On twitch and youtube streams for instance, algorithmic ads are used mainly to reimburse amazon/google for their hosting services (+ a significant profit). Since a podcast is small in size and does not need to be streamed on-demand, hosting costs are negligible. It seems like this model could also be effective for websites, but it requires an actual human to find and vet advertisers. I'm not sure what the solution could be for sites like youtube where self-hosting content is a much higher barrier to most content creators.