Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 236, dated November 16, 2019.
Scaling the host-read ad. At times, the discourse around the future of podcast advertising can feel like it’s presenting a coin flip between two maximal outcomes.
On one side, you have a view towards the preservation of the historical status quo, committing to the black box of artisanal host-read ads — ideologically pure, perhaps, but also seemingly limited in the value it can generate for podcasting’s creative class. And on the other side, you have a vision of a fully programmatic future, one that ostensibly opens podcasting up to more digital media dollars, but nonetheless also raises the spectre of a dystopia filled with obnoxious ads that scream “BRANDS BRANDS BRANDS” into your eardrums every few minutes.
Of course, binaries are rarely true, and there’s always the possibility of a third way. (And fourth, and fifth.) But the thing about alternatives is that they need to be…
