Pre-roll runs before your episode starts, mid-roll runs inside it, and post-roll runs after it ends. Mid-roll is the most valuable of the three by a wide margin, because it is the only slot where the listener has already decided to stay.
Those three positions are the entire inventory of a normal podcast episode. How you lay them out determines both what the show earns and whether it stays pleasant to listen to — and those two things pull against each other, which is the actual subject of this page.
Where the ad breaks go
A 42-minute episode with three markers. Dark segments are ad slots; light segments are your audio.
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Pre-roll 0:00
Before the intro, at the very top of the file
Typically 15–30 seconds
- Best suited to:
- Reach. Everyone who opens the episode hears it, including the people who drop off five minutes in — which makes it the natural home for brand-awareness reads and short, simple offers.
- Watch out for:
- It arrives before you have earned any attention. Keep it short and get into the episode.
-
Mid-roll ≈ 19:40
A third to halfway in, at a natural break in the conversation
Typically 30–60 seconds
- Best suited to:
- Direct response. Anyone still listening this deep chose to be, so promo codes and “go to this URL” asks do their best work here. It is usually the slot advertisers will pay the most for.
- Watch out for:
- Put the marker at a real pause, not mid-sentence. A badly placed cut is the fastest way to make an ad feel like an interruption.
-
Post-roll ≈ 41:05
After the outro, at the end of the file
Typically 15–30 seconds
- Best suited to:
- Your own asks. Cross-promote another episode or another of your shows, plug the newsletter, or sell it as cheaper inventory to a sponsor who wants volume.
- Watch out for:
- Fewest listeners reach it. Price it accordingly, and don't put your best offer here.
You are not obliged to fill every slot. An episode can carry one marker or three, and a marker left empty simply plays nothing — the episode runs straight through.
Pre-roll: cheap attention, expensive if you overdo it
Pre-roll sits at the top of the episode, before or immediately after your cold open and theme. It gets 100% of the people who pressed play, which sounds like the best slot on the show, and is not.
The catch is that “pressed play” and “committed” are different states. At second zero the listener has invested nothing. A new listener sampling your show for the first time, who hits 45 seconds of advertising before hearing a human voice, has a very cheap decision to make. Advertisers know the drop-off risk is highest here, which is one reason pre-roll typically prices below mid-roll.
Pre-roll works best when it is:
- Short. 15 to 30 seconds. Every second beyond that is spent from a budget the listener has not agreed to.
- After your cold open, not before it. Let people hear ten seconds of the actual show first. The hook buys you the ad.
- One spot, not two. Stacked pre-rolls are the fastest way to train people to skip your intro habitually — and once they build that habit they skip past your best content too.
Mid-roll: the premium slot, and why
Mid-roll is the ad break inside your content, usually somewhere in the middle third. Acast, which sells podcast inventory at scale, describes mid-roll as the most lucrative and most expensive slot on a podcast, and attributes the premium to the fact that mid-roll listeners are typically doing something else — driving, working out, washing up — which makes them much less likely to reach for the skip button.
The commitment argument is the honest one. Someone fifteen minutes into a 40-minute episode has already spent fifteen minutes. They are not sampling; they are listening. Everything an advertiser wants — attention, completion, recall — is more likely here than anywhere else in the file.
That makes mid-roll the slot to protect. If you can only sell one spot per episode, sell this one.
Length. 60 seconds is the standard mid-roll unit and the one most host-read campaigns are written for. 30 seconds works. Beyond 90 seconds, a single mid-roll starts to feel like a segment, and listeners begin to time it.
Post-roll: the slot most shows waste
Post-roll runs after the content ends. It reaches the smallest audience — a meaningful share of listeners stop the episode the moment the substance is over — and it is, as Acast puts it, the most affordable of the ad slots as a result.
Two conclusions follow, and most shows only draw the first one.
The obvious one: do not sell post-roll at mid-roll prices and do not put a campaign you care about there.
The less obvious one: post-roll is nearly free real estate for your own promotion. The people still listening after the outro are your most engaged listeners by definition. That is an outstanding place for “if you liked this, episode 51 goes deeper”, or your live show, or your newsletter. It costs nothing, it converts against the best audience you have, and it turns a slot that would otherwise sit empty into catalogue circulation. If a slot cannot be sold, it should be selling you.
How many mid-rolls is too many?
Here is a real number to work from rather than a shrug:
| Episode length | Mid-rolls | Total ad load |
|---|---|---|
| Under 25 min | 0–1 | Pre-roll plus one mid-roll at most |
| 25–45 min | 1 | One mid-roll, roughly halfway |
| 45–75 min | 2 | Spaced at least 20 minutes apart |
| 75 min+ | 2–3 | Roughly one per 30 minutes, hard cap of 3 |
Choosing a break point that does not feel like a rupture
This is craft, not configuration, and it is the single biggest difference between a dynamic ad slot that sounds professional and one that sounds broken.
Cut at a seam, not at a time. The temptation with dynamic markers is to drop one at 15:00 because 15:00 is halfway. Do not. Listen back and find the moment the conversation actually turns — the end of a story, the point where a guest finishes an answer and you change subject. Those moments already have a natural pause in them, and an ad landing there reads as a chapter break rather than an interruption.
Never cut mid-sentence, mid-laugh or mid-question. Obvious, and it happens constantly, because markers get placed against a waveform without listening.
Leave a beat of air on both sides. A half-second of room tone before the ad and after it does enormous work. A hard cut from speech straight into a different room at a different level is what makes people say dynamic ads sound cheap.
Signpost it. “More in a second.” Four words, and it converts an ambush into an expected break. This works even when you do not know what the ad will be, which is exactly the dynamic case.
Do not break during the best part. If the guest is three minutes into the story that is the reason the episode exists, the marker goes after it. Revenue from that mid-roll is worth less than the listener finishing the episode.
What changes when the slot is dynamic
If the ad is baked in, it was written for this episode and will only ever appear in this episode. A dynamic slot is a different design problem, because the ad in it is temporary and the episode is not.
- The ad must stand alone. It cannot reference what you were just talking about, because next quarter it will be sitting in a different conversation. Anything context-dependent belongs in a baked-in read — see baked-in vs. dynamic ads.
- Your timestamps stop being reliable. Insert a 60-second ad and everything after it shifts by a minute. Reference topics in your show notes, not clock times.
- The slot might be empty. With no live campaign, nothing is inserted and the episode plays straight through — which is fine, unless you said “we’ll be right back.”
- Your break points are permanent even when the ads are not. You can swap the ad in thirty seconds; you cannot move the marker without listeners of the old file having heard it in the old place. Choose the position carefully once.
- The whole back catalogue inherits your layout. A marker scheme applied across 150 episodes is 150 slots that a single campaign can fill. That leverage is the main reason to think about slot design at all — the mechanics are in what is dynamic ad insertion.
Putting a price on your slots
Slot choice is only half the equation; the other half is what each position earns per thousand downloads. Podcast ad rates: CPMs and what you can actually earn breaks down typical ranges by slot and format, and you can run your own numbers in the podcast ad revenue calculator.
If you want pre-, mid- and post-roll markers you can place once and refill forever, TurboCast’s dynamic ad insertion is included with Hosting Pro at $29/mo billed annually — markers on every episode, campaigns with start and end dates, and changes that apply across your whole catalogue without re-uploading a file.