Who owns your podcast?

I mean, who really owns your podcast?

The answer depends on your RSS feed, and where it’s hosted.

To see what I mean, let’s look at a few RSS feeds from the Apple Podcasts US Top 200:

• Pod Save America: http://feeds.feedburner.com/pod-save-america
• Welcome to Night Vale: http://nightvale.libsyn.com/rss
• The Ben Shapiro Show: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:174770374/sounds.rss

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice these shows’ RSS feeds live on domains like FeedBurner (feeds.feedburner.com), Libsyn (nightvale.libsyn.com), and SoundCloud (feeds.soundcloud.com). This is a very common approach, and there’s technically nothing wrong with it. A huge number of very successful shows host their feeds on third-party domains.

But at Pacific Content, we believe it’s worth thinking through the long-term implications of your podcast hosting choices. Consider for a moment:

• If you’re Pod Save America, what happens if Google shuts down FeedBurner? Or what happens when Apple Podcasts eventually requires HTTPS, but FeedBurner doesn’t support it?
• If you’re The Ben Shapiro Show, what happens if SoundCloud goes away?
• If you’re Welcome to Night Vale, what if you’re happy with Libsyn for now, but you want to switch to another provider next year?

You could redirect your feed. Many podcast hosting companies promise to help you do exactly that. Yes, <itunes:new-feed-url> exists. And yes, mirror URLs are a thing.

Q. What’s better than redirecting your old podcast feed URL to a new podcast feed URL?

A. Never having to redirect anything, ever.

That’s why we strongly recommend hosting your podcast feed at a URL you plan to own and control forever. For example:

• Hackable lives at https://feeds.hackablepodcast.com/hackable
• Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson lives at http://feeds.podcasts.dell.com/trailblazers
• IRL lives at https://feeds.mozilla-podcasts.org/irl

It’s not just our clients’ shows that take this approach:

• This American Life lives at http://feed.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast
• Serial lives at http://feeds.serialpodcast.org/serialpodcast
• Stuff You Should Know lives at https://www.howstuffworks.com/podcasts/stuff-you-should-know.rss

… among many others.

The good news: it isn’t difficult to maintain ownership of your show’s RSS feed. But it does take some additional work.

At Pacific Content, we use FeedPress to host our podcast feeds. Then we use their custom hostname feature to enable CNAME redirects from client-owned domains to FeedPress.

You can also set this up through Google’s FeedBurner by enabling their MyBrand feature, although some have expressed concerns about the long-term future of FeedBurner.

Remember: even though it’s a bit more work, every podcaster should consider the value in owning their RSS feed for future portability.

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