Tracy Hazzard breaks down how podcast apps work: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart pull episodes from your RSS feed to distribute them. About 25 listening apps exist, but most pull data from Apple. When you share an episode, link to your own page with an embedded player, not to a directory URL.
Podcast directory or directories is thrown around a lot in the podcast industry. Essentially, it's a listening app. Apple is a podcast directory, Spotify is a podcast directory. Iheart is a network and a podcast directory. It's a listening app where you go to listen to that podcast or any set of podcasts, and it pulls everything from the feed, from the RSS feed, the Real simple syndication feed, and that comes from us, your host, Potatoise or any other hosting company. So we're producing that feed and those directory listening apps are pulling that feed. Now there are 25 or so listening apps right now, and many of them pull from the Apple API or the Apple code that they allow to use. So they're actually pulling off of Apple and so you don't actually have to register for those directories. Here at Potitize, we register people into the main directories, knowing that it'll filter down to those others as well. So that's what we're always looking for. Now, in your podcast statistics area, in Poditize's portal, you'll see a listing of directories as a percentage. And that's really where we're sort of grouping together all those podcast listening apps that are pulling the feed on a daily basis or pulling it regularly, and they're hitting that. It's not really going into your episode numbers. It's because it's not pulling from a single episode, it's not listening. It's not a play, but it is accessing it. And those plays that are happening and those downloads that are happening over us on those directories are too small to count. So so many of them, you barely maybe get one listen at a time. So we group them together for all of those, I'm going to call them Add on Directories, Add on Listening Apps, because listing them out, you'd never see them. And this way you can kind of see the power of the tie on to Apple, the tie on to all of these little listening apps that you're getting the value from together. But individually they're not worth your time and energy going into and participating in and taking a look at. The main ones are Apple and Spotify, Spotify, Iheart, and those will be the lion's share of everything that you do at that. In just any podcast episode, the lion's share comes from that, the next one. I half expect YouTube to be rising in the directories as we move forward. Amazon Music is there as well. Amazon has their own podcast within there, but it really hardly has a lot of listeners at this stage for just about anyone. So those are where the podcast directories are located. That's how you access them. That's the power of them. But these are not something you need to worry about. You should never list your podcast directory, your listening apps URL. You should always use the blog post for your episode, or your main episode and podcast page where you have your player. Whenever you share your podcast or any episode out in the industry, out in social media, out in any email you send or anything, you should always share your own site because that's where the main power lies.
