“You Might Also Like: ” being injected into podcast feed
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Hi,
TLDR: An episode titled “You Might Also Like: Counterpoint” appeared on one of my podcast feeds. It’s an episode of some podcast I’ve never heard of with no context in the episode itself or show notes as to why it’s on my podcast feed. This “episode” does not appear in the feed on any other podcast apps nor on Pocketcast’s web player. Trying to figure out what is going on.
Wanting to raise attention to some peculiar behavior. I listen to a podcast called Hyperfixed and today a new “episode” dropped on its feed titled “You Might Also Like: Counterpoint”. It appeared as a “new” episode in my filters list as well as in the Hyperfixed podcast feed.
However, the episode itself has no show notes and the content has no intro – just starts off playing what seems to be an arbitrary episode from some podcast I’ve never heard of.
While it’s not uncommon for podcast hosts to sometimes cross-share other podcasts in their feeds, I’ve never experienced this with no context or intro so it was quite jarring. Tried to find more info about it, however this “episode” does not appear on any other podcast apps or feeds and not even on the feed on Pocketcast’s web player. Nor does it appear on the official RSS feed for the podcast (https://feed.hyperfixedpod.com/). On the app when I go to share the episode and copy its link, visiting the link gives me a 404 error (episode link -> 404: https://pca.st/episode/1fa8c1da-dd37-488d-811a-3327453c8cbc).
This leads me to believe it’s not a real episode published in the Hyperfixed feed but something that has been inserted into my app on this feed as a sort of ‘recommendation’ or ad?
Would appreciate some insight into what is going on here – that is, if this is something Pocketcasts is doing or if this is something the owner of the podcast is doing. Or if anyone else has experienced something similar.
And, if this is indeed some sort of ad, is there’s any way to disable this?
Thanks!!
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Pocket Casts does not insert advertisements into podcast episodes at all. If you’re hearing ads in podcast episodes those are added and fully controlled by the podcast creator, their host, and or any ad companies that they’ve partnered with.
I would suggest reaching out to the podcast creator directly to provide them with any feedback you have. They may be making use of Dynamic Ad Insertion, which is a technology that inserts ads into the podcast file at the time of download — in some cases the podcast creators may not be aware of all of the ads that are being inserted into their podcasts and could have options for preventing some categories of ads from being included.
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Hey, thanks for the response. I think I’ve figured out somewhat what’s happening.
When I went to export my podcast list, I saw the RSS feed for the podcast was this: https://rss.pdrl.fm/d3cf31/feed.hyperfixedpod.com/
The
rss.pdrl.fm/d3cf31/prefix before the real RSS feed seems to be something called Podroll that advertises as being able to dynamically insert ad-episodes (“You Might Also Like”) to a feed. So this seems to answer my question that it’s the owner of the podcast setting this up / opting into this. The only thing that was confusing is why this episode doesn’t appear on any other platforms.According to this, Podroll support was recently added by Pocketcasts (https://forums.pocketcasts.com/forums/topic/podroll/). When I unsubscribe from the podcast and try to add the exact RSS feed “https://feed.hyperfixedpod.com” from the discover search bar, the only Hyperfixed podcast that pops up as available to add is the one with the podroll prefix (as tested with OPML export). Though yeah, I assume this is expected behavior.
One of my other podcasts I’ve found also suddenly has these “You Might Also Like” episodes and they appear as every other episode in the feed which seems unintentional. But this may be a Podroll issue, so I’ll reach out to them first.
Pocket Casts Forum 