Eero Plus Update May Block Podcasts

Amazon recently released an update to their Eero Plus ad-blocking service available in their Eero wireless routers. The update may prevent any device connected to the Eero router from downloading some podcasts from TWiT and other podcast networks.

Most podcasts use some sort of tracking service which will measure downloads and provide other analytics. For example, in addition to TWiT's internal "Middle Man" system, we currently use Spotify Ad Analytics and Podscribe so that some advertisers can measure their ads' success in each episode. These services will let the advertisers know how many people downloaded the episode in which their ad appears, and some also measure how often someone who downloaded that episode then visited their website. At TWiT, we respect our listeners' privacy, and there is never any personally identifiable information shared with the advertisers. They'll only know the number of listeners and will never be told anything about any of those individual listeners.

Ad blockers occasionally place one of these services' domains on their block list. When this happens, it blocks all attempts to download the podcast episode that uses these services. In this case, the ad blocker in Eero Plus was updated to add one or more of these podcast services. Unfortunately, there is no transparency with Eero Plus, so we're unable to tell exactly which service or services are being blocked.

We contacted Eero's support team to alert them that they were blocking podcast downloads. In response, they asked us to let any customers facing this issue to contact them on support.eero.com "so that we can further check their network details."

To work around ad blockers and allow them to download podcasts using these services, we recommend adding the following domains to your ad blocker’s allow list:

• twit.tv (our main site that you're reading now)
• cachefly.net (our host for most of our podcast media)
• libsyn.com (Libsyn also hosts some of our audio content)
• pdst.fm (Spotify Ad Analytics, formerly Podsights)
• pscrb.fm (Podscribe)
• memberfulcontent.com (Memberful - hosts for our Club TWiT feeds)

We will maintain a list of these at twit.tv/allowlist and update it if and when these domains change.