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Pod Save America host Tommy Vietor lashed out at Spotify Wednesday for attempting to “destroy the podcast industry” with a new feature that will allow Premium users to skip ads entirely.
“Very cool of @Spotify to try and destroy the podcast industry. What a great partner!” Vietor captioned a screenshot that detailed the “Skip Ahead” feature.
The screenshot came from James Cridland’s explainer of what “Skip Ahead” will be about. As Cridland pointed out, many Spotify users already skip ads — or at least, they have the ability to do so.
“However, while listeners can skip ads in podcasts – and regularly claim they do – data from podcast analytics company Bumper, looking at real-life behaviour rather than survey claims, suggests that less than 10% of ad-breaks are actually skipped,” Cridland pointed out. “This new Spotify feature would appear to make it much easier to skip: requiring one button press to cleanly skip to the beginning of the next section of podcast.”
Cridland also noted his team “calculated that to skip one of the ad breaks would have otherwise required nine taps on the “skip 15 seconds” button, and then would have slightly overshot the break, needing a further tap backwards.”
“Skip Ahead” is currently only available to Premium users in “selected markets.” In a test conducted by Cridland’s team, the option to skip an entire ad “appears on-screen as soon as an ad-break starts.” Users can move ahead of the full ad break with a single tap.
Cridland also pointed out an aspect of the feature that’s been viewed as hypocritical by some: “The ‘Skip ahead’ feature appearing within Spotify’s own shows means that on the one hand, Spotify is selling ads, but is also marketing a ‘skip’ feature to its own paying users, to enable those ads to not be heard.”
A spokesperson for Spotify told Cridland, “We regularly conduct tests at Spotify — some tests become permanent features, while others help inform future product development. We’re exploring ways to make podcast listening and viewing more intuitive for Premium subscribers based on how people use the platform, with the goal of helping listeners spend more time enjoying podcasts. We’ll continue to evolve the experience as we learn.”
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