Show HN: The first ad blocker for podcasts

Show HN: The first ad blocker for podcasts(itunes.apple.com)

3 points by shadesofmike 9 years ago | 5 comments

Hi everyone, I got sick of hearing the same ads over and over again in podcasts, so I made this ad blocker for podcasts.

How it detects ads?

The app detect ads by either a user identifying an ad (by clicking the Podblocker button) or by a large minority of users skipping forward at the same point in a podcast. Once an ad is identified, we have a team that locates the exact starting and ending position of the ad.

Why not use ML to identify ads?

We would love to, but we can't work out how to make it economically feasible. A bag-of-words model we think would work reasonably well to detect an ad. However, at this stage, the cost of speech to text recognition is around $0.02 a minute, so if you are identifying ads in 10,000 podcasts that release once a week with an average duration of 45 minutes you are looking at spending around $468,000 a year just to get speech to text recognition.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to tackle this we are all ears.

gigatexal 9 years ago | |

Do you think poscasters show ads because they want to? They do so to support themselves and the cost of putting on high quality programs. They're often easy enough to skip. I would have been indifferent to your app if not for the .99 cent a month subscription which to me feels like theft.

shadesofmike 9 years ago | | |

The app works by blocking ads that the community finds objectionable. We have found that a lot of users are frustrated by longer and longer ads, repetitive ads, and ads inappropriate for their interests. In particular, a lot of our users are not based in America, so an ad for buying US postage stamps isn't that relevant.

We allow users to subscribe to up to 6 podcasts without paying the subscription fee. I think this is a pretty good deal. Unfortunately, unlike a desktop ad blocker - we need a lot of human involvement to block the ads.