Why there are no ads on Onion Podcasts
Nothing plays before the episode
Between opening an episode and its first word, nothing happens: no twenty-second pre-roll, no voice telling you who pays for this, no mid-episode break.
It is not a launch promotion or something we simply haven't added yet. It is a decision: we don't want to make money from podcasters' work. When a platform drops an ad before an episode, it sells attention it did not create — the person who wrote, recorded and edited the show did. We don't want to be the middleman who shows up only when it's time to collect.
The same rule for what isn't ours
On Onion you also hear shows we don't host: they reach you through their public feed, cost us nothing, and we have no deal over them. It would be the easiest place in the world to insert ads — nobody negotiated them, and the creator might never notice.
We insert none. Someone else's episode sounds exactly like one we host: it starts and ends with the creator's audio. Profiting from someone's work is no better or worse depending on which server the file lives on.
What changes for you
You listen straight through. And because we don't live off advertising, we don't need to build a profile of you either: that profile only exists to make an ad worth more, and here there are no ads to be worth anything.
Podcasters can run ads
The nuance that holds all of this up: we are not the ones who decide whether a podcast carries advertising. A creator can line up their own sponsors and place them inside their audio; if they do, those ads reach you here just as they would in any app. We don't strip them, don't replace them, and don't charge a cent for them.
Because the problem was never ads — it was who keeps the money. A sponsorship a podcaster negotiated, read in their own voice and was paid in full for is their work. An ad a platform sticks onto the front of someone else's episode is something else.
The only fine print
We won't promise this never changes; nobody can promise that honestly. But today the structure doesn't push that way: there's no venture capital waiting on a return, no board asking us to "monetize the audience" eighteen months from now. Onion is built in Mallorca, small, and any money that eventually comes should come from creators who already earn well — not from your attention sold to third parties. If that ever changed, it would be explained here, plainly and in advance.