Trevor Noah & The Daily Show just dropped a limited 5-episode parody series, called The Daily Show Podcast Universe. Very ONION-like. I listened to the first two so far.
LOL!
Zip Recruiter: we vasty over estimate how many podcast listeners are in a position to hire someone!
Had me laughing on my Casper mattress.
Yes. 
I was seriously waiting for him to ask if she managed her tasks with OmniFocus.
Nah, this will be a written advertorial on the squarespace blog. You can find it via one of the domains registered via hover. – Obviously, given that your non-eero wifi network holds up. If you try to connect when you are out and about, please use ExpressVPN for this critical data connection.
We seem to listen to the same ones… 
I get it; podcasters need ads to survive. But success leads to excess …
How long will it take for the advertisers and other large commercial interests to dominate and effectively ruin the podcast space as we currently know it?
We have seen this happen elsewhere. The U.S. Mail, at least for individual customers, is dominated by advertising junk mail. The trivial amount of “real” mail I receive is usually embedded in a sloppy assemblage of red plum ads. Our landline telephones are now virtually useless due to junk and malicious calls. Junk calls are increasing in frequency on our mobile phones. We are starting to see junk text messages and political text messages appear.
NPR, probably the largest podcast producer, has proposed and is promoting a new podcast analytics standard (“RAD”). If widely adopted, this could increase the influence of advertisers in the podcast industry and change the nature of many, if not most, podcasts. Currently podcast ads tend to be infrequent, dignified and non-intrusive. If the proposed RAD podcast standard is adopted, expect advertisers to track listeners’ activity and monetize listener data.
More information here (post in theverge.com): https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/27/18156895/npr-remote-audio-data-rad-analytics-podcast-tracking-apple-spotify
That’s why I think it’s important to use and support podcast clients like Overcast that refuse to implement analytics.
Overall, I’m not worried about podcasting becoming spoiled because hosts/shows/networks I like can’t be drowned out by more cutthroat productions. Podcasting has unlimited shelf space and you only need to venture to the store when you want to change what you’re automatically getting every week.
Overcast and Castro have “skip the first 5 min” feature to skip the ads/intro. Could we see a day where podcasts are created for specific apps without these skip like features?
Of course. Three possible answers:
- It is possible that large podcast producers (NPR, for example) could become larger and more dominant to such an extent that the content producers/distributors could require certain podcast apps that would limit ad-skipping.
- Spotify has entered the podcast space. With its large audience/customer base, Spotify or another producer/distributor could eventually exert a great deal of control over advertising or subscription fees, or both. I think that listeners can download podcasts through Spotify now, but it is possible that in the future Spotify or another producer/distributor could limit podcast listening to streaming only.
- It is my understanding that the RAD analytics standard already specifies dynamic ad insertion. Depending on how this is implemented, the listener might have limited ability to skip dynamically-inserted ads. One simplistic means to thwart ad-skipping would be to randomize the timing of the ad insertion. We see this already in ad-sponsored YouTube videos.
Please do not construe my comments as blanket disapproval of ads in podcasts. Tasteful, pertinent and non-intrusive ads are fine. I would like to see the podcast industry, or at least a part of it, remain as entertaining, informative and pleasant as it is now. Our experience with ad-supported websites makes me wonder about the future of podcasts, however.
Pocket Casts has always had the ability to granularly skip intros, globally or per podcast, in addition to user-configurable fast-forward/rewind times (I’ve found that a 75-second skip works well for getting through most in-podcast ad reads).
IIRC Downcast used to let you configure skip-outros too.