• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Today

 I listen to a fair number of podcasts and skip all the ads every time.  I feel bad about it, seeing as how I live and work in advertising.  I know that when given the chance to skip commercials on TV, as much as 90% of the audience will skip, and I assumed the same went for podcasts.  In fact, I sat down to write this article to ask whether anyone listens to podcast advertising, but upon further review, I discovered that an astonishing number of people do!

I should probably caveat my surprise.

Skipping a podcast ad is so easy.  The 30-second forward button is easy to access, and it’s so simple that I assumed even a caveman could do it (see what I did there). 

Yet when I looked up the numbers, I found a few sources that seem to align around a general truth that many listeners simply don’t skip the ads.  Various sources report 34% never skip (Acast), 68% hear some or all the commercials (Inside Radio), and 28% listen to all the ads (Podnews).  Conversely, I saw that 46% always skip (Inside Radio) or 49% skip most or all the time (eMarketer).

To me, that suggests 35%-40% never skip, and 50%-55% of the time listeners hear some of the ads.  With a skip function as simple as it is, how are these numbers so strong in favor of the ads at all?

If they are listening, what is it that makes them listen?

I would love to say they listen because of the inherent value derived from a targeted ad delivered to a target audience.   In fact, I am willing to offer that as half the reason.  I think the other half is due to the fact that behaviorally, people listen to podcasts when doing other things, and maybe the act of skipping is more of an interruption to that behavior than it is worth. 

For example, you listen to podcasts while running or working out.  You listen while on a bike ride, or maybe while relaxing at the beach or by the pool, and the simple act of changing your focus, or shifting your hands to skip would kill your flow and is not enough to warrant the action.  Maybe that co-activity behavior actually makes it worthwhile to hear the ads, and that’s part of why the medium is considered effective. 

After all, we know that half of our advertising works, we just don’t which half.   Maybe podcast advertising, at 50% effectiveness and with a focused audience, works enough to be a core component of an ad mix.

There’s also something to be said of familiarity.  Radio ads, and therefore the format of ads in podcasting, have been around for so long that maybe the audience is simply OK with them.  One thing podcast advertising gets right is the ad slots are not standard, nor are they too long.  When I listen to the various podcasts I listen to, the interruptions may be 2 ads, or 3 ads, but rarely more than that.  Some are host reads too, which is more tolerable and tends to blend in more.  Maybe podcasting is just a good medium for advertisers, and my innate cynicism was simply unfounded and ill-placed. 

Podcast ads do seem to work, and here’s to uncovering that on a sunny day, walking outside, listening to a podcast while walking my dog.