This is helpful. I hadn’t tried it in another podcast app before speculating, which is a total failure on my part. Accusation against Marco retracted with an apology. It’s a really frustrating bug but not a malicious intention.
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I’m not fully up to date, but advertisers and podcasters are able to track much more than downloads. For example, this is what Apple promises podcasters:
https://podcasters.apple.com/support/5392-listener-analytics
The details of what exactly is tracked for adverts is less easy to find but there is a lot of discussion of “impressions” (i.e. every time an advert is downloaded - which is often separate to when a podcast is downloaded - with dynamic ad insertion adverts are downloaded as you are listening in many podcast players and tailored to your location and very often to you - via an ad id that is sent to the ecosystem.
One of the selling points of Overcast is that the app does not track you for adverts, nor do Overcast’s servers.
I thought the dynamic ad insertion was still at the time of download. Even in Overcast, you can get different ads when you re-download a podcast – it just packages the MP3 file with different inserts.
Given that the podcast standard is an open standard built upon RSS, I would think that would be the only way to realistically do it. Although obviously if you were streaming episodes, then what you said would be true in the sense that it would be true for the whole episode – and the ad would be maximally up-to-date. 
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I doubt that any podcast client playing a downloaded podcast episode has the capability to download an Ad on the fly and splice it into a podcast episode while playing it. It may be true if streaming (I never stream podcasts), but when you download a Podcast, the ads are “baked into” the podcast episode before it can be downloaded as you may be offline when listening.
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I assumed he was referring to ads inserted into podcast streaming. Spotify’s ad network does this, for example. But they use a different term than DAI to avoid confusion when talking to advertisers and disclosing to users.
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If only there was someone who frequented the forums that ran Podcasting network who could join in on the discussion and perhaps clarify how ads work. 
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I would see Downloading Podcasts and Streaming podcasts as two very different things
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Just found this:
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Relay doesn’t do any dynamically-inserted ads, so I don’t have a lot of experience there.
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Oh well. Thanks anyway.
Marco is a champion of adding chapter markers with his podcast creation tool Forecast, so this as a starting point works against any argument that Marco is intentionally forcing people to listen to adverts.
Way back in the day, the Apple Podcast app didn’t let you change the skip forward duration or back, where Overcast from day 1 has enabled this, this is my primary way of skipping annoying adverts.
Now getting back to your points:
1 - Do you see the same behaviour with Overcast? I’d suspect that 90%+ of the listening going on for Overcast is via the iOS app, so once again doesn’t support the argument.
2 - If you are listening to a podcast that is downloaded, remembering that CarPlay only acts as a display for your phone, do you see the same issue. This would help isolate if the issue is with dynamic podcast advert insertion with Overcast or a much beeper bug.
3 - Marco has been quite open about the challenges with CarPlay (as have other devs), I don’t have CarPlay sadly…however I believe that Marco does now with his current car, so who knows, things might get better.
4 - Have you actually reported this as a bug via suggested channels, or just here?
I used Pocket Casts for a bit (still have it installed and check it form time to time), however for me the inability to mark episodes as played from the queue view is mind bogglingly absent, but that’s just me.
I never found excluding specific chapters as something that I needed, further it is not common for listeners to review the whole chapter list before listening to a podcast. Not to mention, most of the podcasts that I subscribe to don’t have chapters. One button to skip the rest of a chapter that I don’t want to listen to (you can change your skip forward button on your headphones) isn’t the end of the world.
As to this having some relevance to forcing people to listen to adverts, I do have to disagree. Most adverts are added on purpose to run over the chapter break, so even if you skip a chapter, you’ll still likely get the call to action bit. Of the few podcasts that have chapters, none have adverts themselves as chapters. Why Marco doesn’t want to add a new feature to Overcast to choose to exclude chapters, one can only suspect it’s because people aren’t asking for it in enough volumes to invest that effort.
I would argue that inclusion of skip beginning and end is far more impactful for removing adverts you don’t want to listen to, also don’t forget that variable skip forward and back lengths weren’t originally common (Overcast always had it).
Could I suggest that we all consider a different framing for the topic of adverts?
If you enjoy and want content without paying in some way, do click the sponsorship URLs in the show notes from time to time (and why not listen to an advert every now and again if you have time).
I’m sure we’ve all heard from various Podcasts just how hard the ad market is right now, economic challenges are one component, but I’d also guess that engagement with audience and click through rates are also trending down because of skipping etc.
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Sorry, I should have specified that live dynamic ad insertion is only possible when streaming - if you are downloading the podcast, the ads may be inserted at the point of download.
There’s a definite push in some quarters towards streaming, which I don’t think is coincidental. Ads that are tailored to market and id are more valuable to advertisers.
It got Marco into trouble when he tried to replace streaming with incremental downloading, but it does seem to show that lots of users also prefer streaming to downloading.
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I agree with your comments about chapters: like everything else about podcasts, the quality of the listener experience is down to editorial decisions made by the podcasters much more than it is about the technical “features” of the podcasting ecosystem: and those decisions are complicated - they have to please advertisers and sponsors as well as recruit and retain listeners if they want to keep making shows.
On advertising: I sincerely wish we could find better and more flexible ways of paying for “content”. Advertising is designed to capture attention and take it away from whatever you are watching or listening to. That’s its purpose. Some ads are much more intrusive or in conflict with the content than others, and some take you out of the show much more than others, but all advertising is in direct competition for attention with the content. Loudness levels for advertising in audio has been a debate for decades, and advertising wins because it pays the bills.
Online micropayments have been discussed since the 1980s, but have never really been made to work. Subscriptions or memberships require you to pay for a “package” only some of which you may actually need or value and as everybody knows, they add up quickly. We don’t seem to be able to find a better way. People were heavily into wire cutting, but we’re seeing the one-time-disruptors like streaming services consolidating ever bigger packages as they demand ever larger subscriptions, when most people really only want a tiny fraction of what their subscription provides.
Marco was running a CarPlay Head unit on his desk for years to allow him to develop natively (as much as you can for CarPlay)
Would love for David and Stephen to talk about this on the MPU podcast, they are always pretty upfront about developers they have a relationship with and they always seem unbias when it comes to discussing those products’ strengths and flaws
They had Marco on shortly after the launch.
I really meant about the current development and or lack of. I wasn’t as frustrating with Overcast as many have been but its so unreliable when i try to airplay to a speaker than it pushed me towards Pocket Casts.
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I need to figure out how to best direct my time and attention while also protecting my intellectual and emotional stamina.
This is what overcast feels like since the rewrite: a developer who thinks everything is okay and is burned out on listening to users who disagree.
Everything is 3-4 more (undiscoverable) swipes than it used to be. Sometimes I literally can’t figure out how to make the current “sheet” go away so I can get to the feature I need. Meanwhile, the developer buys a restaurant, checks out from the app, and tells the users he doesn’t have the emotional stamina to hear the feedback.
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