Hi everyone, I wanted to take a moment for a little PSA about my show, the Green Lion Podcast. It has come to my attention tonight that Monetization was somehow enabled on my podcast account. It looks like a total of 306 ads were served over the course of several episodes, and it appears to have occurred very recently. It appears that ad revenue of $0.87 USD was accrued over this period of time.

I did not enable Monetization or ads, nor would I (nor will I, ever). I have disabled them, and removed & rejected the revenue from my account. Keeping my podcast ad-free is something that matters very dearly to me. I suspect it may have happened because the host I use offers a free plan (which I use, per their guidelines). Nothing that I read about their free plan mentioned anything about ads being turned on after a certain amount of episodes. I have been doing some research and have been unable to find anything explaining what happened. I have reached out to the hosting company to ask what happened and whether they can offer some kind of logs showing when it was enabled and where. If this happens again, I will be finding a different host.

I would like to formally apologize if anyone here decided to listen to an episode and was greeted by a pre-roll ad, or was interrupted part-way through an episode by a mid-roll ad. This was not my intention, and personally I'm appalled that it happened.

I respect everyone's choice for monetizing their own content, and I don't begrudge anyone who does. I realize the value of it, but I personally choose to abstain from this practice, and I am deeply saddened by the fact that it happened without my consent.