How Many Ads Are in The Ancients? We've Cleaned 610 Episodes
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We’ve cleaned 610 episodes of The Ancients through ZeroAds. The ad numbers on this page are recent by design: they come from the 5 episodes processed between July 16 and August 5, 2026, and they’ll firm up as new episodes arrive.
The Ancients is a History Hit podcast about the ancient world, hosted by Tristan Hughes. When someone adds it to ZeroAds, our pipeline cuts the ad segments out of each episode’s audio and logs every cut with timestamps. This page is that log, added up. Snapshot: episodes processed July 16 to August 5, 2026.
What we measured
Section titled “What we measured”| The Ancients | |
|---|---|
| Episodes measured | 5 |
| Episodes cleaned all time | 610 |
| Median ad time per episode | 4.9 minutes |
| Median ad share of runtime | 7.1% |
| Typical episode length | about 71 minutes |
A typical episode runs about 71 minutes, and the median measured episode carried 4.9 minutes of ads.
How The Ancients compares to other podcasts
Section titled “How The Ancients compares to other podcasts”Across every show we measured this window, the median episode is 9.8% ads, about 4 minutes. The Ancients comes in under that as a share of runtime, with close to the typical ad minutes. The full distribution and the heaviest shows we measure are in our August 2026 podcast ad study.
About the show itself: ads are how The Ancients gets made, and this page is a measurement, not a complaint. We’re building revenue sharing so the shows our subscribers listen to most will get paid from subscription money.
How to listen to The Ancients without the ads
Section titled “How to listen to The Ancients without the ads”ZeroAds serves The Ancients back to you as a clean private feed. You keep the app you already use: the feed works in any podcast app that accepts a custom RSS URL, which is most of them. (Spotify and Amazon Music don’t accept custom feeds.)
- Sign up at zeroads.ai. Your first 5 episodes are free, so you can hear a cleaned episode of The Ancients before paying anything.
- Add The Ancients and play your free episodes in the ZeroAds app.
- Subscribe to get your personal ad-free RSS URL and add it to your podcast app.
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.
Get The Ancients without the ads →
Questions
Section titled “Questions”How many ads does The Ancients have? In our measurements (5 episodes processed July 16 to August 5, 2026), the median episode of The Ancients carried 4.9 minutes of ads, 7.1% of its runtime.
How do I listen to The Ancients without ads? ZeroAds cuts the ads out of each episode and serves The Ancients as a clean private RSS feed for the app you already use, any app that accepts a custom RSS URL. Spotify and Amazon Music don’t take custom feeds. The first 5 episodes are free.
Will my episodes have the same ads you measured? Probably not exactly. Most podcast ads are inserted at download time, so your copy of an episode can carry different ads than the copy we processed. The pattern holds; the exact minutes vary.
Are these numbers exact? Close, not exact, and early. We test the detector against hand-labeled episodes: it catches about 97-98% of labeled ad time, and about 85% of every second it cuts lands on labeled ad time. With 5 episodes measured in this window, expect these figures to move more than on our larger-sample pages.
Measured from the 5 episodes of The Ancients processed through ZeroAds from July 16 to August 5, 2026. Ads are inserted dynamically, so your copies may differ. Full methodology in the study.