A short video by Tom Hazzard (Poditize) explaining how some podcast hosting platforms ‘hijack’ episode web links—redirecting listeners from a podcaster’s episode page to the host’s site—using real examples (Transistor vs. Poditize). He demonstrates the consequence for listeners and podcasters and recommends ensuring episode links point to the podcaster’s own website.
Hi, this is Tom from Poditize and I'm here to share with you one of those reasons why we call a lot of other podcast hosting platforms hosting hijackers. I'm going to show you a very real world example right here. There is a very important link that is available to you in the podcast ecosystem. Every podcast hosting platform gives you the ability to put a unique link for every episode of your podcast, a unique link to a web page for every episode of your podcast. And a lot of people, a lot of you podcasters, I'm sure, are already creating a unique post on your website for every episode. That's really where you should send it. And you know, the better that post is providing supplemental information, the more valuable that that link and that post is going to be for your listeners. Unfortunately, a lot of podcast hosts out there, other hosting platforms, are hijacking your traffic. Your listeners that are listening in the listening app, it is tricking them really into going to their website instead of yours. So I'm going to show you here on the Anchor Point Podcast. Here is an episode. And this I'm looking using the Apple Podcasts on the web information for this demonstration. And you can see at the bottom of the information, it has a link to the episode website. And you just go and click on that and you're thinking, oh, this is going to take me to Anchorpoint Podcast's website. When in fact, when you click takes you to a web page on Transistor fm, which is the hosting platform this podcast uses. And this really is hijacking your traffic from the listening app. And instead of sending them to your website, it sends them here to Transistor. And the real frustrating thing for a listener is there is no more information here than what already existed in my listening app on Apple Podcasts. It's all the same information. It's just a duplicate of it on Transistor. And as a listener, I would be very frustrated that I clicked this. I expect to get additional information and I don't get it. I got the same information and as a host, I'm even more frustrated when I, you know, learn about this because I wanted people to go to my website, not to transistor. So I'm going to show you an example. This is one of our podcasts, feed your brand our podcast for podcasters. And I'm going to click into an episode and go to the episode website link. And you're going to see this goes to a actual really long form blog post on potatoes.com for this episode. And there's more information here, wider format graphic, you know, still your description. But hey, maybe there. I know this podcast is also done as a video and I want to watch the video. Well, here's the video right here. Anybody can watch. Sure, if they want to listen here, they can. But here comes the text from what was said in the episode and other major important quotes, social share graphics, other, you know, video or audio clips, notable quotes highlighted and, you know, caption graphics. You know, here's, here's a good quote. People can share this on Twitter using that quote as the tweet. But I'm going to zip to the bottom and show you. There's always a summary of important links we have for ours, and often it contains a dozen or more links. This episod happens to have only three. But the point is there's more information here for your listeners. And of course, when they get to your website, then, you know, they can explore whatever it else, whatever else you have to share with them and, you know, explore whatever is on your website. But this has real value to me as a podcaster. I'm getting traffic off of that listening app and over to my own website. And, and at Potatoes, we don't hijack your traffic. What happens over here on Transistor is not going to happen on Poditize. We don't even default it to go to our platform because we believe as a podcaster, you absolutely should get the full benefit of all the traffic from your listeners. All roads should lead back to your website. And if you're on a platform like this, there is a way to, to replace that episode web link with a unique one for every episode or even if you don't have that, send it to the podcast page on your own website. And this is assuming you have a real website. And if you don't, I highly recommend you get one because that's how you're going to get the greatest value out of your podcast. And we have, you know, topics, we talk about that on Feed your brand. And actually you, if you're a part of the email series that got you here to this landing page and video, there's one about your home base.
