Ad skip for supporting listeners

Players could be made to skip ads for paying customers. Currently podcast producers make somewhere around $25/thousand plays for an ad. That’s two and a half whole pennies per play, which is challenging not to spend all in one place. Let's say a supporting listener paid $1/month for a weekly episode to have ads automatically skipped. This would quintuple the publisher’s income from that listener.

How it would work

If the Timeline file that ships freely marks the position of ads, any app could skip ads without compensating the publisher. So for each episode there could be a publically available Timeline and also a premium Timeline for authorized users. I call this Timeline Restricted, or Timeline-R. As long as the listener is using an app that supports Timeline-R authorization and Timeline Ad-Skipping, ads will then be skipped automatically.

Content producers could also add other sorts of paid-only content for Timeline-R, like producer's notes, similar to the director's commentary option on a DVD.