Testing Podtastic: A Creator’s Look at Ad-Skipping, Data, and the Open RSS Model

I co-run The GCRN with TFG1Mike. 17 years, roughly 38 shows, over 4,500 episodes, and a whole lot of RSS feeds we’ve built by hand. So when I ran across Podtastic, a small podcast player pushing a feature called “Smart Skip” and a campaign called “Save Open Podcasting,” I wasn’t going to just nod along or grab a pitchfork based on internet speak. I went and checked after Mike sent me an ad for it off Instagram.

To be clear up front: I have no problem with ads. Ads pay for the mics, the hosting, the time. My issue is when an ad break stops being part of the show and starts acting like the whole point of it, when the entertainment and the education take a back seat to the money engine. That’s the lens I brought into this.

Here’s what actually happened when I looked into the company’s privacy policy and terms of service, ran the app against our own shows, and got the founder on record.

The line that got my attention

During onboarding, once you tell Podtastic you listen for entertainment, the app drops this on you:

“You listen to enjoy yourself. We’ll keep it flowing, no ‘this episode is brought to you by.'”

No spin needed there. That’s the app telling a brand-new user, straight out, that skipping past the exact kind of host-read ad that keeps shows like ours running is part of the pitch.

Who’s behind the curtain

Podtastic comes from Freewheel Group Limited, a small UK outfit (500-plus downloads, sitting around 2.7 to 3.0 stars across a dozen or so reviews, according to its Google Play listing). An app still in its infancy stages. I asked directly, and the founder, Ben, laid it out plainly: “No parent company, no investors. It’s me, a solo developer who has been building apps and businesses in media for over 15 years.” Not a VC-backed machine trying to swallow podcasting whole. A small, independent app running a business model that’s genuinely uncomfortable for creators.

Does it actually touch your episode file?

No. I went in assuming the worst: that “processing” an episode meant Podtastic was quietly generating and shipping around a doctored copy of the audio. That’s not what’s happening.

Their privacy policy says audio “is not sent to our servers; only derived text data may be transmitted.” Ben backed that up on the record when I pushed on it:

“Categorically not. Neither feature modifies, re-encodes, re-hosts or stores the episode audio. The file is downloaded from the publisher’s own server to every individual listener’s device… Smart Skip moves the playback head on the listener’s own device.”

Bottom line: the app pulls your original file, same as any player out there, and moves the playhead during playback based on where other listeners tend to skip. It doesn’t cut anything or redistribute your work.

The privacy claim, and where it gets a little loose

Podtastic’s marketing leans on “your data stays on your device.” Mostly true, not the whole picture. Google’s own required Data Safety disclosure for the app lists usage data and diagnostics as things it “may share with third parties.” Their own privacy policy explains it: transcript data, not audio, syncs across your devices through their servers, and third-party AI providers (Google Gemini, Z.ai) generate the summaries and topic markers. Ben was upfront about this and clear that Podtastic isn’t building ad profiles or selling listener data.

So: your audio stays put. “Everything happens on your device” is doing a little more marketing work than the fine print backs up. Worth knowing. Not worth torches.

The part that actually matters to creators

This is the real question, and I got it answered straight from the source instead of guessing.

There’s no revenue share for creators, and no way to pull your show out of Smart Skip. Ben’s reasoning, in his own words:

“There’s no creator opt-out, for the same reason no podcast app has one: the app plays public feeds that anyone on the internet can already fetch, in a player the listener controls, on the listener’s own device… A publisher who doesn’t want open podcast apps playing their show can stop publishing a public feed.”

Technically airtight. RSS is public by design, that’s the whole deal. But it’s also exactly where this gets uncomfortable. Any open podcast app could build this. Podtastic is just the one openly marketing a feature built to skip the part your sponsors are paying for, and none of that comes back to the show.

What about dynamic ad insertion?

I asked Ben point blank whether DAI shows are more likely to get their ad breaks flagged as “commonly skipped” over time, even if Smart Skip isn’t hunting ads specifically. His answer:

“Yes, interruptions listeners skip are often ads, however, from the ad server’s point of view there’s no difference between a listener skipping via Smart Skip and a listener pressing the skip button.”

He didn’t dance around the mechanism. His actual defense is different: tools like this only get traction once ad loads have already blown past what listeners will sit through. He pointed me to a Podnews piece by editor James Cridland, on a separate story about Spotify testing its own ad-skip button:

“Some podcasts are starting with more than eight minutes of ads. This is unsustainable, both for the advertising industry, and for the listener. It is hard to argue in favour of eight minutes of ads in a row. We’d suggest it merely teaches listeners to skip those prerolls altogether.”

I checked that quote against the original Podnews piece myself. It’s accurate.

I’ll be honest, that number stopped me. Eight minutes of ads at the front of an episode is not a sponsor read, that’s a toll booth. Ben’s position is that Smart Skip is a per-show, listener-controlled toggle, and plenty of listeners leave it off for shows they trust. Keep your ad load sane and your host reads worth hearing, he argues, and listeners won’t bother flipping it on. Let it run wild, and they were already skipping you anyway.

That’s a genuine argument, not a dodge. It shifts responsibility onto the show’s own ad load instead of onto the tool, a fair position for Ben to hold and a fair one for creators to push back on. Either way, it’s worth knowing the mechanism is real: Smart Skip can catch a sponsor read the same as anything else listeners tend to skip.

Can creators actually use their API?

Ben offered it up, with an honest catch: The GCRN doesn’t have enough active Podtastic listeners yet for the API to spit out anything useful. Right now, exactly one episode across the whole network (an episode of Movie Week in Review) has AI-generated topic data. He said he’d circle back once our numbers grow through the app. I’ll test it more in depth once there’s actual data behind it, not before.

The bigger argument Ben makes

Ben didn’t stop at answering my questions. Unprompted, he laid out a longer case that the real threat to open podcasting isn’t small apps like his, it’s Spotify, and that its Partner Program and video push are steadily routing creators and listeners away from RSS altogether. Which I wholeheartedly agree with as an indie podcaster myself.

He sent over 27 sourced entries backing this, dated, verified, mostly his own words with links and verbatim quotes attached. I checked two of the heaviest ones myself before putting them in front of you. Both held up. After re-reading, I actually remember these announcements and believe I covered them on Altered Geek.

Back in 2022, at Spotify’s Investor Day, Head of Talk Maya Prohovnik told investors the company had “been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution,” and called RSS “outdated technology.” Four years later, a May 2026 announcement to creators said Spotify’s video features “require content to be directly uploaded to the platform instead of distributed through standardized methods, such as RSS.” Ben’s take: that’s a consistent, stated push to move podcasting off the open protocol that’s kept it playable on any app, on any device, for two decades.

That’s one of the things I highly respect about RSS.com as our podcast host: their RSS feeds can carry the audio and the video together and send both to these platforms using native, open podcasting methods, no upload-only workaround required.

He also pointed to reporting on what networks are already giving up. A Digiday piece from June 2025 quoted an anonymous podcast executive estimating that joining Spotify’s Partner Program, which switches off a network’s own dynamically inserted ads for Spotify Premium listeners, “takes away the advertising opportunity by five to 50 percent, depending on a lot of different characteristics.”

Whether that adds up to Spotify deliberately gunning for open podcasting, or just a big platform doing what big platforms do, is a bigger fight than I set out to settle here. It’s real, it’s documented, and it deserves its own coverage. But it doesn’t change the narrower question I came here to answer: what Podtastic’s feature actually does, and what it costs creators. Both can be true at once. A giant platform can be reshaping the whole industry’s incentives, and a small indie app built on the open ecosystem can still be quietly skipping your sponsor reads.

Where this leaves indie podcasters

• This is a small, transparent, one-person operation, not a platform trying to eat podcasting. Ben answered every question straight, backed it with sources, and didn’t flinch from the parts that don’t flatter his own app.
• Podtastic doesn’t touch or redistribute your episode files. Confirmed through my own testing and on the record from the founder.
• The privacy story here is better than most consumer apps. “Everything stays on your device” oversells it a touch. Your audio does. Some of the derived data doesn’t.
• Smart Skip moves the playhead during playback based on aggregate listener behavior, which can include sponsor reads and DAI breaks. There’s no revenue share and no opt-out beyond pulling your RSS feed private.

That last point is the one worth sitting with, but it doesn’t need a villain to matter. Ben’s own argument, that a reasonable ad load keeps listeners from reaching for the skip button in the first place, is a fair one, and it lines up with the eight-minute-preroll problem the wider industry is dealing with right now. Podtastic didn’t create that pressure. It’s a small app responding to it, honestly, by Ben’s own account.

Update, September 22, 2026

A note before the rest of this: the “small, transparent, one-person operation” framing above was written before the reporting in this update came to my attention. I’m leaving that section as it was written rather than quietly editing it, but readers should weigh it against what follows here.

After this piece went up, I wrote James Cridland, editor of Podnews. Here’s where he agreed with what’s already in this piece, and where he didn’t.

On the core mechanism, he agreed with Ben’s point that an ad server can’t distinguish a Smart Skip from a listener hitting the skip button themselves. But he drew a sharper line than I did between the two in practice: “there’s a world of difference between an automatic skip so you never hear any of the ads, and having to flick about a podcast using a skip-forward-30-seconds button. One needs user interaction, the other doesn’t.” Which I too agree with his point as without user interactions, the ads and sponsored bits are essentially DOA.

On the eight-minute ad load I flagged above, he pushed back on the idea that it justifies what Smart Skip does industry-wide: “just because a tiny minority of shows put eight minutes of ads in front of its shows doesn’t mean that 100% of all shows should have their ads taken off.” His own proposed fix, from his original Podnews piece, is different from Podtastic’s approach: an industry norm capping ad blocks at a few minutes, with a tool like Spotify’s skipping only ad breaks that run long, rather than skipping ads regardless of length.

On Smart Skip and ad quality specifically, his view is that it doesn’t matter how good a sponsor read is: “even if your sponsor reads are worth the listener’s time, this app will still skip them.” That’s a direct challenge to the “keep your ad load reasonable and listeners won’t turn it on” framing Ben gave me, and it’s worth sitting with as a real counterpoint.

Cridland also raised something new: that Podtastic’s user-agent identifies the app as Apple’s Safari browser rather than as Podtastic itself. His words: “he [Ben] has specifically tailored his app to spoof Apple Safari, rather than give a proper user-agent. That means that you will never know how many people are using his app, and, more to the point, will not be able to block it.” A Podnews piece published the same day, “Apple & Google making money from ad-blocking podcast apps,” reports the same claim and adds that Podtastic’s developer, Ben Bowler, previously ran a similar app that Podnews covered in January and that closed in May, before Podtastic launched.

Cridland closed with one more point: Apple and Google take roughly 30% of Podtastic’s subscription revenue, and neither has taken action against the app despite Podnews reporting it to Apple in July. His read is that this makes both platforms complicit. I’ll leave that conclusion to him and to you. What I can say is that a standard app-store cut isn’t unique to Podtastic, but the fact that Apple was reportedly notified and hasn’t acted is worth knowing regardless of how you weigh it.

Cridland’s September piece isn’t the first time Podnews reported this. An earlier piece from January, “The tool copying podcasts, stripping the ads, and selling them,” covers the same ground independently. It describes PodcastAdBlock as a tool “using AI to copy podcasts and resell them without ads,” selling “their own ad-free copies of shows from publishers like Spotify, NPR, the New York Times, Slate, iHeart, and New York Magazine without permission,” a more specific claim than simple on-device skipping. I remember when this article came out and found myself in shock that this was even happening.

Ben wasn’t asked to respond to this specific reporting for this piece. Everything he told me earlier here, about file handling, about opt-outs, about why there’s no revenue share, stands as his own words on the questions I did put to him directly. Whether those answers hold up against what Podnews has documented and investigated is something I’d rather leave to them. In any case, it’s highly concerning from my personal vantage point as things continue to evolve with Podtastic.