So I’ve run my own show for just about ten years now. We’ve never had ads or sponsorships of any kind other than a Patreon plug at the very end.
When I go out into the world and listen to other podcasts I’m perpetually annoyed at the lengthy, frequent ad-breaks. I don’t mind being reminded to engage or click on their link or go to a show’s Ko-Fi page, but a two minute dollar shave club or AG1 ad is just too much. And, honestly, the amount of advertising dollars some shows take makes me question their integrity just a bit. I know it might be a bit old-fashioned to think that, but I can’t help it.
What are you favorite sponsorship-free, ad-free podcasts?
Walk The Pod is a daily-ish ramble chat on various topics. It only has a Patreon plug (https://walkthepod.com/)
Total Party Kill is a D&D actual play podcast that I have yet to hear an ad on. (https://www.theincomparable.com/tpk/)
Your Rivers Are Wrong is a podcast about storytelling. No ads here either. (https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yraw-podcast)
There’s a whole ecosystem of listener-supported podcasts using the “value for value” model popularized by “the Podfather” Adam Curry. You can find most of them on podcastindex.org or through a supported app like Podverse or Fountain.
Give “the fall off civilisations” a go
Geeknights - 2 geeks talking about geeky stuff which is not just 1 but 3 different shows.
Ludology - talks about boardgame design
Self-hosted podcast - this one has a couple ads but all related to the tech and usually includes discounts
Darknet diaries- I think this has a bit of ads but can’t remember right now
Hackaday - news about random stuff and cool projects
Just remembered people make games, but it’s for patreon only
Can you give a general idea of what sort of subject matter you’re interested in?
A history of rock music in 500 songs is very good
I used to like kexp song of the day but they changed the format.
Now I like https://kutkutx.studio/category/song-of-the-day/feed
Also many good shows on WFMU, some music, some talk. https://wfmu.org/podcast
My favorites are:
- Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine
- Honky Tonk Radio Girl with Becky
- Techtonic with Mark Hurst
- Bucci (warning this one is weird but in a good way
Other good ad free ones:
- Birdnote. https://feeds.simplecast.com/OB7SrYSf
- Derrière le son (French language) https://feeds.podcastics.com/podcastics/podcasts/rss/5423_17676b1841af819ae181d6abb1a2e320.rss
- Molly White’s Citation Needed (interesting but lower production value) https://www.spreaker.com/show/6019906/episodes/feed
Let me know if any of these have ads I’m pretty sure they all don’t.
I’ll have to sit down tomorrow to go through these ones, but thanks for listing them all out in such a nice format!
Good Morning Johto is a fun Pokémon news podcast. They sort of do ads, but it’s made up shit. It’s funny.
Final v3 is funny cartoon man Noodle and his game-dev friend Sam talking about the creative industry. Mostly about why you shouldn’t work in the creative industry.
Well There’s Your Problem is two communists an anarchist exploring awful ways architecture and infrastructure can turn people into a homogeneous paste. Notably this one has slides to accompany the audio.
Kill James Bond is a review podcast for slagging off spy movies and related films.
I remember liking to “David Tennant does a podcast with”. I don’t remember any ads. Unfortunately it’s over now
Fall of Civilizations Podcast by Paul Cooper.
He doesn’t release very often, but when he does its high quality, very long and completely ad free.
It’s a fantastic podcast I would suggest anyone to listen to, Paul is a excellent storyteller and manages to breathe incredible life into history, even if you might not be interested in it.
Sounds awesome! On the list.
This is probably the pinnacle of what the modern documentary format should be.
Cannot recommend it enough.
Blowback is incredible, and has ads only at the beginning and end, so very skippable. I can’t recommend Blowback enough. Each season covers the “behind the scenes” of different US atrocities, from the Iraq War, to Cuba, to Korea, to the Afghan War, to Cambodia. Any USian needs to listen to it especially to truly understand how and why US foreign policy acts in the manner it does.
Oh yeah I listened to a bunch of them, it was definitely very good. Pre and post ads are probably the most bearable sort, but I’m trying to avoid them altogether if possible. But for anyone with more tolerance than me: absolutely also recommend this one.
Note: I don’t actually listen to podcasts myself (I struggle to process voices when doing other tasks, or for long periods of time) but my spouse enjoys it.
I’ve listened to this one before! Pretty interesting show, but unfortunately opens with several minutes of ads. Latest episode is about two and a half minutes of ads right off the bad, although one is their Patreon.
I haven’t overheard them in awhile, didn’t realise they open with ads now. Sorry for the suggestion that doesn’t fit your criteria!
No apology necessary! Many of these are still ending up on lists that may or may not get listened to one day :)
- Citations Needed
- Behind the News with Doug Henwood
- Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
- Macro N Cheese
- Geopolitical Economy Report
- The Deprogram
- Actually Existing Socialism
- Revolutionary Left Radio
- Guerrilla History
- This Machine Kills
- Tech Won’t Save Us
- Bad Faith
- The Socialist Program with Brian Becker
- QAnon Anonymous
- TrueAnon
Well, there’s your problem is another one.
That’s quite the pile of political shows! I’ll dig through them and pick out the ones that hook me. Thanks for taking the time to link them all, makes it easier to use an online took to yank out the RSS feeds for subscription.
I’m not sure those links will render RSS feeds. I just pulled them from my Apple Podcasts app. None of them are exclusive to Apple, though, so if you’re not in the Apple ecosystem you can still find them.
Oh they will, I use a website that yanks the feeds. Having them all in one list like that makes it easier for me to parse through them though.
If you ever need to yank the RSS from a show then I have lots of success with: https://www.labnol.org/podcast. It’s specifically for just this kind of thing. Weirdly a lot of shows, even on their own websites, don’t make RSS feeds readily available.
This has just let me recover a podcast where the feed from the site I was using stopped working, thank you :D
Interesting! You extract the ID from the link (e.g. the
1258545975from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id1258545975) and then:$ curl -s 'https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=1258545975' | jq -r '.results.[0].feedUrl' https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/rss $Oh wow I didn’t realize it was so simple. I couple just slap that into a bash script and save the effort of going through a website…maybe even use it for bulk processing when I get lots of recommendations.
#!/bin/sh # Get the original RSS feed URL from an Apple Podcast show URL. podcast="$1" id=$(echo "$podcast" | awk '{sub(/^.*\/id/, ""); print}') curl -s "https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=%24id" | jq -r '.results.[0].feedUrl'There seems to be a bug in Lemmy that messes up the script’s rendering a little, but you’ll figure it out.
- The Cryptid Factor
- The Modern Mann (very few ads)
- Darknet Diaries (very few ads)
F1 related:
- Superlicense
- The Midfield F1 podcast
- For Formula 1’s Sake
- Box of Neutrals
I assume the first one was a typo and you meant Cryptid Factor? Seems like a really cool show, but unfortunately opens straight up with ads. First one was for 1-800-Flowers and then on to one for Rocket Money.
Yeah I did, and that’s a shame they now have ads. They definitely didn’t used to, been a while since I listened to one of their episodes tbf.
Well the allure of Rhys Darby might be enough for me to stomach some of it. Time will tell though.
