I'm not so sure, but I would love to be proven wrong.
The issue I'm seeing is that there are many orders or magnitude more potential content providers out there than people are willing to manually validate and white-list.
This might lead us to a situation where only the largest content providers/creators still get access to ad money which in turn will make it impossible for creators targeting a more niche audience to still have a chance in the market.
Case in point: lately I'm totally into science videos on YouTube. From the more mainstream "Space Time" to the now-not-as-niche-as-in-2012 "Cody's Lab".
While the latter doesn't share the former's production values nor budget, it's YouTube ad revenue that allows both to exist and to me personally, both provide equal value.
It concerns me that in the future, if this trend continues, only one of the two will have a chance to survive.
Niche creators can always leave the algorithms behind and work out ad deals on their own. Podcasting is an area where this is how it has always worked, and will continue to work.
Also, I think you need to change your perspective. Ads allowed these niche channels to exist, but these niche channels might not be providing value to the ad networks proportional to their cost. In essence: they're riding the gravy train. They're an inefficiency in the system.
They should work toward becoming valuable, or they should seek alternative forms of funding. Maybe people like you just need to be more open to the value-for-value model. If you like what they are doing, pay them for it.
If you watch an ad on their show but don't interact or otherwise act on it, you're part of the problem. Its like complaining about traffic while you're in your car on the freeway.
Niche creators never had a chance in the first place. The few pennies you get for thousands of impression don't cover the expenses to run the site or the time to write the content.
Tell that to the thousands of niche podcasters out there who sustain their programs through marketing partnerships.
Niche creators do stand a chance. They just need the opportunity to reach their audience with a degree of intimacy and trust that the horrific scourge of mainstream online video and corporate 'journalism' do not and cannot offer. Certain media can enable this for their viewers and others less so. It's no cliche to say that medium is the message in this context.
Native advertising in podcasting is proof that not all online advertising has to consist of bludgeoning ignoramuses over the head with colorful nonsense within the infinite scroll of their Facebook feed. It can be about legitimate respect for a brand and a brand's legitimate respect for it's engaged, targeted niche demographic. But at the current rate of things, the web will require another massive spree of innovation to fix the tragedies caused by Facebook and Google over the past 10+ years to ever reach this point.
Podcast advertising is really not the same as the ad networks on a blog or website. It's far more analogous to the advert spots that radio does.
It doesn't even need to be particularly native advertising. I've listened to a bunch of ads on Dan Carlin's Hardcore History that are completely unrelated to the subject of the podcast.
I believe you're mistaken. At the end of every Hardcore History episode, Dan Carlin recommends an Audible book related to that day's topic. It doesn't get more native than that.
Also, the comment I was responding to was using YouTube ads as an example, which are temporally inserted, very similar to podcast and radio ads.
When media consumption demands true engagement of both time and attention, the ad quality improves. Even the best niche digital video content on YouTube is too low-brow to offer a comparable experience to viewers. Again - the medium is the message.
A good thing for the big players, not the web. Everyone else (like me) me pays for their hosting with a few dollars a month in ad revenue will lose out.
Thank you. We mostly make apps for other companies, but a lot of our own apps are linked (directly or indirectly) from our homepage (http://rocketshipapps.com/):
I came here to make this comment. I found that quote offensive, as both a founder (I’ve started two companies) and angel investor (I “started” zero of these companies!). According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lacob), Joe Lacob has never started a company.
We just (last week) launched an Android ad blocker with Samsung that doesn’t require rooting your device or switching to another browser (our app works with Samsung Internet, which is the default browser on most of their devices): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rocketship...
> In any case, it's just impossible for me to figure what is the issue. I could spend a inordinate amount of time guess-shuffling code around for no result.
I’d caution against the shuffling code around to try to reverse engineer the approval rules. I tried the same with a similar extension (Adblock Fast) that got rejected for similar reasons (no reasons as far as I could tell). Result: my dev account got automatically suspended. I had to get a Google friend to get me unsuspended. Google seems to have added very aggressive automated approval and suspension rules. I’d reply to their email and see if they reply back first.
