Podcasting 2.0 August 14th 2026 Episode 267 - "Chocolove" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - THE SPOTIFY "SKIP AHEAD" BUTTON — THE BIG ONE What it is: Spotify is testing a button that appears on the playback screen the moment it thinks you'd want to skip — an intro, a sponsorship message, or an entire ad break. It is bigger than everything else on screen. One tap drops you at the end of the break, back in the show. Premium subscribers only, selected markets including US and UK, and only when the app is in the foreground. Who broke it: James Cridland at Pod News, 4 August 2026 — an exclusive. Spotify never announced it. Semafor and most of the trade press picked it up afterwards; Cridland noted on air this week that some of them ran it without credit. The number that makes it different from a skip button: Cridland's arithmetic — skipping a typical ad break by hand is nine presses of the 15-second button, plus a correction tap when you overshoot. Skip Ahead is one. "Some people have said, oh, but you've been able to skip for years and this is no different. But a button that only appears when it's stuff that Spotify thinks you should be skipping is a start." It skips other people's money: the button fires on third-party ads — Acast, Odyssey, the New York Times — and on ads inside Spotify's own shows. It even skipped Search Engine's read for its own paid tier, PJ Vogt pitching Incognito Mode. One half of Spotify sells advertisers reach; the other half hands listeners a button to leave. Spotify's answer, and the trapdoor in it: Spotify told Cridland it is "not affecting ad delivery." True only if delivery means to the device. Cridland: "If ad delivery is to the listener's ear, which is actually what people are paying for..." — the download still counts, the ad still gets billed, the human never hears it. Spotify's other defence: the button merely shows where other listeners already skip. Cridland: "I'm not entirely sold on that, but if that's what Spotify say, I mean they wouldn't lie." THE LINE FOR THE BOARDROOM — read the terms of service: "What's to stop them from going, you know what, people are using that skip ahead button, why don't we just turn that on automatically? I went to have a look at the terms and conditions of Spotify. There is nothing to stop them from doing that. Nothing at all. And let's be clear, that would destroy the ad-supported ecosystem that podcasting is." Why the scale makes it existential: Spotify is 72% of all podcast downloads in the Philippines, 47% in Mexico, about a third in Australia, 75%+ in some markets. ~300 million paying subscribers plus 500 million free. Cridland on the smaller ad-strippers: "Podtastic will never be that big... they're not going to materially harm the podcast industry. This is." And it sets the precedent — if Spotify does it, every other app can say the same. The YouTube comparison, and why it fails: YouTube also lets you skip some sponsor reads — but YouTube pays creators to be there. Spotify pays nothing for an RSS show to be on Spotify. Same behaviour, opposite deal. Board question (Adam): if the ad is baked into the file and the file is fully downloaded, who exactly is the injured party — and is that an argument for the download metric or the final proof it's worthless? Timing, for the cynics: Spotify's Q2 report credited "favorable podcast impacts" with pushing its profit margin to an all-time high — in the same window it built a button to strip other people's ads. Pod News — Spotify th
