How Many Ads Are in WSJ What's News? We Measured 20 Episodes
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The median episode of WSJ What’s News carries 1.8 minutes of ads. That’s 13.6% of its runtime, measured across our 20 most recently processed episodes; all told, we’ve cleaned 488 episodes of the show through ZeroAds.
What’s News is The Wall Street Journal’s short daily news briefing. 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”| WSJ What’s News | |
|---|---|
| Episodes measured | 20 |
| Episodes cleaned all time | 488 |
| Median ad time per episode | 1.8 minutes |
| Median ad share of runtime | 13.6% |
| Typical episode length | about 13 minutes |
The ads are short, 1.8 minutes in the median episode. The episodes are short too, about 13 minutes, so those ads still take 13.6% of the runtime.
How WSJ What’s News compares to other podcasts
Section titled “How WSJ What’s News compares to other podcasts”Across every show we measured this window, the median episode is 9.8% ads, about 4 minutes. What’s News sits above that as a share of runtime even though its ad minutes look small; short episodes concentrate the load. The full distribution and the heaviest shows we measure are in our August 2026 podcast ad study.
About the show itself: ads are how What’s News 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 WSJ What’s News without the ads
Section titled “How to listen to WSJ What’s News without the ads”ZeroAds serves What’s News 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 What’s News before paying anything.
- Add What’s News 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 WSJ What’s News without the ads →
Questions
Section titled “Questions”How many ads does WSJ What’s News have? In our measurements (20 episodes processed July 16 to August 5, 2026), the median episode of WSJ What’s News carried 1.8 minutes of ads, 13.6% of its runtime.
How do I listen to WSJ What’s News without ads? ZeroAds cuts the ads out of each episode and serves What’s News 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. 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 most of the remainder on the edges of those same ads. Treat each figure as carrying a few percent of measurement error.
Measured from the 20 episodes of WSJ What’s News processed through ZeroAds from July 16 to August 5, 2026. Ads are inserted dynamically, so your copies may differ. Full methodology in the study.