ZeroAds does one job: you give it a podcast’s RSS feed, it cuts the ads out of the audio, and it hands back a clean private feed for the app you already use. Doing that job sixty thousand times leaves a record. Every ad we cut is logged with timestamps, per episode, per show.
That record is now big enough to be worth publishing. We pulled the numbers on July 8, 2026. Here’s what podcast ads look like from inside the audio.
The headline numbers
Section titled “The headline numbers”- 60,536 episodes with ads removed
- 5,398 hours of ads cut. Played back to back, that’s about 225 days of nonstop advertising.
- Median: 4.3 minutes of ads per episode.
- Average: 5.4 minutes. The gap between those last two numbers is the story.
Most episodes are mild. The tail is not.
Section titled “Most episodes are mild. The tail is not.”The distribution leans low. 13,987 episodes (23%) carried under two minutes of ads, and the most common load was two to four minutes. If that were the whole picture, podcast ads would be a shrug.
The tail is the rest of the picture. 7,897 episodes, 13% of everything we processed, carried more than ten minutes of ads. 639 episodes carried more than twenty minutes. 126 carried over half an hour of ads in a single episode. Each of those is a specific episode of a specific show, and if your subscriptions lean the wrong way, that tail is your commute.
What the median costs a listener
Section titled “What the median costs a listener”Take the median, 4.3 minutes, and a listener who gets through eight episodes a week. That’s about 34 minutes of ads a week, close to 30 hours a year, inside shows they chose on purpose. Follow heavier shows and the number climbs fast. Which brings us to the table.
The shows that carry the most
Section titled “The shows that carry the most”Per-show numbers from our catalog. The rule is mechanical: any show with at least 20 measured episodes qualifies, and these are the top 16 by ad share. Ad load is the share of runtime that was advertising.
| Show | Ad share of runtime | Episodes measured |
|---|---|---|
| Handel On The Law | 44.0% | 26 |
| Covino & Rich | 36.7% | 62 |
| Dear Chelsea | 36.6% | 26 |
| The Ben Maller Show | 35.1% | 69 |
| The Jason Smith Show | 33.2% | 69 |
| The Dan Patrick Show | 30.1% | 60 |
| Pod Meets World | 24.9% | 125 |
| Stuff To Blow Your Mind | 21.9% | 82 |
| Las Culturistas | 19.3% | 26 |
| No Dunks | 18.7% | 160 |
| The Glenn Beck Program | 16.1% | 163 |
| The Alex Jones Show | 15.3% | 21 |
| Strict Scrutiny | 15.3% | 42 |
| Security Now | 15.2% | 36 |
| Mile Higher | 14.7% | 30 |
| Behind the Bastards | 14.6% | 300 |
You can download the table as CSV.
Two patterns.
First: every show above 30 percent comes out of iHeart or Fox Sports Radio, and most of them are daily radio programs repackaged as podcast feeds. Broadcast radio was built around ad breaks, and the podcast versions inherit them wholesale. Handel On The Law as a podcast means 15.7 minutes of ads in an episode of roughly 36 minutes.
Second: the percentage can hide the minutes. The single highest ads-per-episode figure in the dataset is The Alex Jones Show, at 33.2 minutes of ads per episode across 21 measured episodes. Its episodes run long, so as a share of runtime that comes to 15.3 percent. Security Now, same shape: a moderate 15.2 percent, but long episodes, so 20.4 minutes of ads each. On a long show, a reasonable-sounding ad load takes more of your day than a heavy load on a short one.
The caveats, before you quote this
Section titled “The caveats, before you quote this”The full methodology names everything wrong with this sample, and you should read it before citing the numbers. The short version. Our data covers the shows our users chose to clean, which skews toward talk-heavy US shows, so this is a measurement of our catalog, not of podcasting overall. Industry benchmarks (Magellan AI among them) put average ad load around 5 to 8 percent of runtime, and nothing here contradicts that. Podcast ads are inserted dynamically at download time, so these figures describe the copies we processed at the moment we processed them. And since detection is verified at 90%+ rather than 100, whatever we miss never gets counted, so every total in this post is a floor.
About the people making the shows
Section titled “About the people making the shows”Ads are how most of these shows get made; the minutes in that table pay salaries. So this data is a measurement, not an accusation. On our side, we’re building revenue sharing so the shows our subscribers listen to most get paid from subscription money. Until that ships, the plain description of ZeroAds is that we work for the listener.
If you’d rather not donate the 30 hours
Section titled “If you’d rather not donate the 30 hours”ZeroAds serves your shows as clean private feeds that work in any podcast app that accepts a custom RSS URL (not Spotify, which doesn’t). Setup is pasting one link, about two minutes. The first 5 episodes are free, so you can hear a cleaned episode before paying anything. The founding rate is $5.99 a month while the first 500 spots last (more than 180 are claimed); after that it’s $7.99.
We measured the ads in 60,000 episodes so you don’t have to sit through them to know what they cost.
Questions about the data
Section titled “Questions about the data”How many minutes of ads does a typical podcast episode have? In our measurements (60,536 episodes, snapshot July 8, 2026), the median episode carried 4.3 minutes of ads and the average was 5.4 minutes. 13% of episodes carried more than 10 minutes.
Which podcasts have the most ads? Of shows with at least 20 measured episodes in our catalog, Handel On The Law had the highest ad load at 44% of runtime, then Covino & Rich (36.7%) and Dear Chelsea (36.6%). Every show above 30% in our table is an iHeart or Fox Sports Radio production.
What percentage of a podcast episode is ads? Industry benchmarks (Magellan AI) put the average around 5 to 8 percent of runtime. Our catalog runs heavier because people bring us the shows that bother them; its heaviest shows measure 30 to 44 percent.
Are podcast ads increasing? Ad load per episode across the industry stays flat to slightly down, even as podcast ad revenue grows about 18 percent a year (IAB/PwC). What a listener feels is the unevenness: a few shows carry several times the typical load.
How were these numbers measured? We measure the ads we actually cut, timestamped per episode. Detection is verified 90%+, and in our accuracy tests (against hand-labeled episodes) the pipeline catches about 97% of ad segments. Anything missed is absent from the totals, so they undercount true ad time.
Will my copy of an episode have the same ads? Probably not exactly. Ads are inserted dynamically when an episode is downloaded, so your copy can differ from the one we processed. The pattern holds; the precise minutes vary.
Methodology
Section titled “Methodology”How we measured the ads in 60,536 podcast episodes. Snapshot date: July 8, 2026.
ZeroAds sells ad removal, which means every number in the study comes from a company with something to gain. Read it that way. This page is the full method, including the parts that cut against us. For what it’s worth, the central finding (most episodes carry a modest two to four minutes of ads) is not the number a marketing department would have ordered.
Where the numbers come from
Section titled “Where the numbers come from”When a user adds a show, our pipeline downloads each episode, transcribes it, and runs a two-pass classifier over the transcript to mark ad segments. Marked segments are cut from the audio, and every cut is logged with start and end timestamps. The study is that log, aggregated: 60,536 episodes with at least one ad removed, 5,398 hours of ad time, as of July 8, 2026. We measure what we actually cut: edits to specific audio files, logged as they happen. No part of the study is a model’s estimate of a market.
What counts as an ad
Section titled “What counts as an ad”Whatever the classifier marks as advertising: ads inserted into the episode by an ad server, and sponsor segments recorded by the show itself. Both get cut, both get counted.
The sample, and what’s wrong with it
Section titled “The sample, and what’s wrong with it”The sample is every episode processed on our platform. Users pick the shows, so it skews toward what our users listen to: talk-heavy, US-centric programming. People also come to us for the shows that annoy them, which overweights heavy shows. That’s selection bias and we can’t correct for it, so treat every number here as a description of our catalog. For the market-wide picture, industry benchmarks (Magellan AI among them) put average ad load around 5 to 8 percent of runtime. Nothing in our data contradicts that.
Dynamic insertion
Section titled “Dynamic insertion”Most podcast ads are stitched into the file at download time, per request. Two listeners downloading the same episode can get different ads in different amounts. Our figures describe the copies our pipeline downloaded, at the moments it downloaded them. Download the same episode again today and the ad minutes can shift. The distribution is stable across 60,000 episodes; any single data point is one copy’s snapshot.
Why the totals undercount
Section titled “Why the totals undercount”We only count an ad if we caught it. Detection is verified at 90%+, and in our accuracy tests (against hand-labeled episodes) the pipeline catches about 97% of ad segments. That’s a test result, not a guarantee, and it’s about what we remove, so anything that slips through appears in no log and no total. Every aggregate in the study is a floor. True ad time sits somewhat above what we report.
Rules for the per-show table
Section titled “Rules for the per-show table”Four rules. A show appears when we’ve measured 20 or more of its episodes; that’s the entire inclusion test, and we didn’t exclude any show editorially. Ad-load percentages are computed only for episodes where total duration is known; ad minutes don’t need that, so the two figures can rest on slightly different episode sets. Duplicate feed rows (the same show added under more than one RSS URL) were merged before counting. And the chart covers the top 16 by ad share; the study’s lead image and social images use the aggregate charts (the stat tiles and the histogram), not the show table.
Median versus average
Section titled “Median versus average”The median episode carries 4.3 minutes of ads; the average is 5.4. The average sits higher because the tail is heavy: 13% of episodes carry more than 10 minutes, and 126 episodes carried over half an hour. When one number has to stand for the dataset, we use the median.
What this data can’t say
Section titled “What this data can’t say”It says nothing about shows nobody has added to ZeroAds. It can’t tell you which ad server or network placed a given ad beyond what’s audible in the file. We didn’t measure listening behavior, only episode contents. And it isn’t evidence that podcast advertising is exploding: industry ad revenue grows around 18 percent a year (IAB/PwC), while per-episode ad load market-wide stays flat to slightly down. Our tail numbers show how uneven the load is. They say nothing about growth.
Checking the work
Section titled “Checking the work”If you’re covering this and want the aggregation queries, the bucket boundaries, or the measurements behind any show in the table, ask and we’ll share them. If you find an episode where our numbers look wrong, send it over. We’ll check it against the audio, and if we got it wrong we’ll say so in public. Misses get analyzed and used to improve detection, so skeptics are doing us a favor either way.
The charts and the table in this post are free to reuse, with a link to this study as the source. The table is also available as a CSV download (show, ad share of runtime, episodes measured).