Spotify is certainly monetizing their podcast platform. At least for the Spotify-produced shows, they’re injecting ads regardless of whether you pay for premium service or not.

There's a reason I said "unhindered monetization" -- imagine what Spotify would be doing if there wasn't a major podcast directory service outside of their control.

I did wonder why the podcasts I listened to on Spotify had ads in them which were clearly targeted to my region.

That's a thing for regular old RSS podcasts too: There are services that slice geo-targeted ads into your MP3 files.

Caught me somewhat by surprise one day when I walked past a hospital and got an ad in a podcast for that very hospital (GeoIP for my mobile IPv6 is correct at the zip code level).

In fact, Spotify even allows podcasts to deliver their own MP3s (if you meet the requirements for their "Passthrough" program), which gives distributors that don't want to use Spotify's ad platform more control and is probably a condition for them even listing on Spotify.

By default, and presumably also for old Spotify Connect devices that only support Vorbis, they reencode all files and cache them on their own CDN.

I had something deployed on fly for a few months and was regularly running into random restarts and connection issues. I ended up switching to DO’s app platform and haven’t seen any of that since.

You clearly have never cared for a child.

On the contrary, I have 4 daughters and I took them to the grocery store earlier today.

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