I'm actually glad Podcasts are still like that and don't need any special interaction. I don't mind the ads, especially if they are not pre-recorded but just embedded in the show like on Gruber's Talkshow where he speaks them live and sometimes guests even say something in the ad too.

If you appreciate this style of ad delivery (and don't mind his...uh....language), comedian Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast and Thursday Just Before Friday Monday Morning Podcast has some hilarious ad reads. He hates doing it, he hates having to do it, and he openly mocks how silly some of the ad copy can be.

Which apparently is fine by his sponsors because apparently they convert incredibly well (it might also have to do with Andrew Themeles, producer and comic as well allegedly is very particular about who they are willing to be sponsored by since neither of them are hurting for the money).

But I agree, ads that are just naturally read and we get back to the show is preferred. The minute someone tries to get 'disruptive' with ads in podcasts I fear the whole house will come crashing down.

My impression is that the vast majority of podcast listeners skip through ads, because that's what I do. It's easy to hit the 15s forward button four times and get right back to the funny interesting stuff. It's a lot harder to skip the ad if the funny, interesting host is riffing over the entire ad read - which means that the listener is still getting the product info, even if the host is making fun of the copy the whole time. Other hosts I've seen include references to the products they're hawking in the actual show (host response to guest's story about sleeping on a mattress on the floor: "I hope that mattress was a Leesa!") and I imagine they're getting a little premium for that.

That second approach is pure product placement. I'm sure it's being monetized.

Agreed. The ads are also short enough that I'm not bothered with 3 ads over a 2 hour podcast. The breaks are also not typically forced, unlike the radio. In a podcast the current topic can come to a natural end, then a quick ad can be read.

One podcast I listen to does the ad at the very end. It should take a couple a minutes, but tends to turn into another 30 minutes of interesting content.

I do feel like we are still in the golden age of podcasting, and something is going to come along and ruin it.

I think it's starting to be ruined by ad networks that insert automated ads at download time. Then creators ask for at least a dollar per episode on Patreon to avoid these and start locking away content at even higher price points.

Podcasts are audio/video files served via RSS, a podcast app needs to know how read RSS and how to play or open your player, what you propose is something different, you would have to embed those ads somehow and extra functionality but keep backwards compatibility, if you mark the ads then you make it easy to add a function to skip the ads, then the publishers will want to lock the format with DRM so you can't skip those ads, IMO your idea will ruin the experience

Someone could make a case for ad monetization being the reason much of the web isn’t avilable through simple RSS feeds.

There are already focused platforms that do this, for example dynamically picking ads based on subscriber IP to give a local ad.

Kind of weird to hear a local car dealership ad in the middle of a popular national podcast.

Also, you have no control over the playing platform (it originally was MP3 players like iPods which have no internet connectivity), and little to no information on the subscribers except for their IP address retrieving a MP3 url (no browser involved), so standard "run ten tons of garbage javascript" tracking/monitoring to sell users as the product doesn't work (thankfully).

You could do the Alexa integration for radio ads today. The choose your own ad would only work for people listening to a podcast in an integrated player on the podcast's website. This would not work for people who subscribe to the podcast and download an mp3.

For the downloaders, you can only really target ads based on download time and IP address. I don't think this is much better than radio ad targeting for most use cases, as IP addresses aren't very good at consistently identifying an individual. I do at least hear local pre-roll and post-roll ads for non-local shows.