Howling into a Megaphone: Archiving the History of Podcast Advertising

On the ninth episode of StartUp, host and Gimlet Media cofounder and CEO, Alex Blumberg, details an early mistake made by his podcast network’s program Reply All that “plunge[d] the young company into the center of an internet controversy” (Gimlet 2014). That series’ premiere episode included an advertisement for Squarespace that centered on an interview with a charming nine-year-old boy named Riley who had used the service to build a website dedicated to his burgeoning fandom of the video game Minecraft. Though the advertisement appears rather innocuous on the surface, Blumberg states that the problem stemmed primarily from disclosure: neither