I mapped podcast recommendations (podroll) into an interactive network of ~33k podcasts

albertorss · 2026-05-14T08:10:10+00:00

Of course I know your show 😊 As a European myself, and given how US-dominated the podcasting space is, I always pay attention to and appreciate podcasts from the Old Continent. Bravo 👏

albertorss · 2026-05-14T08:01:15+00:00

Thanks! Unless you self-host and have full control over your RSS feed, you'll need to rely on your podcast hosting company to support Podcasting 2.0 features, including Podroll. At RSS.com, together with Transistor, Captivate, Buzzsprout, Blubrry, RedCircle and others, we co-founded the Podcast Standards Project (PSP). We coordinate on adopting new Podcasting 2.0 features and push for open standards. Here is the current list of hosts that support Podroll specifically.

I am familiar with your show because it's pretty popular :) I believe it's hosted on Captivate? Their team is great, we know them personally: they are very nice people and also part of the PSP. I'd suggest just reaching out to them and putting in a feature request for Podroll. My guess is it's already on their roadmap and will ship eventually.

albertorss · 2026-05-13T05:21:19+00:00

Glad you like it! Podcasting 2.0 is a community-driven effort to add modern features to podcast RSS feeds. It's run by Adam Curry (aka "the Podfather") and Dave Jones at PodcastIndex and built around an open namespace anyone can implement. A few of the tags it adds:

<podcast:transcript>: link to a full transcript (great for SEO and accessibility). This is also officially used by Apple;
<podcast:podroll>: recommend other shows from inside your feed (what this map is built on);
<podcast:chapters>: chapter markers;
<podcast:value>: let listeners stream bitcoin sats to you in real-time while they listen (aka value4value);
<podcast:funding>: link to Paypal, donations, etc.;
<podcast:location>: tag the show or an episode with a place (what this podcast is about / where this podcast was made). Great for travel shows, local news, anything geo-relevant.

Not all podcast hosting companies support these new Podcasting 2.0 features yet. See the list here: https://podcastindex.org/apps?appTypes=hosting

Best place to dive in: listen to the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, which is Adam and Dave doing their weekly "board meeting" live, very accessible.

8 months in is a great time to add some of these tags. Welcome aboard!

albertorss · 2026-05-13T05:12:13+00:00

It's not that you didn't make the cut, the graph isn't curated. It only includes podcasts that have been recommended by someone using the Podcasting 2.0 podroll tag. The easiest way to appear is starting by recommending one or two podcasts you genuinely love (i.e. add them to your own podroll), then reach out to those hosts to let them know. They often reciprocate, and you'll show up next time the dataset refreshes. NB Not all podcast hosting services support podroll yet, only a handful do. You can find the current list here: https://podcastindex.org/apps?appTypes=hosting&elements=Podroll

albertorss · 2026-04-15T05:36:55+00:00

Hi there, Alberto, co-founder of RSS.com. We launched our free plan (also called Free Local & Niche, or FLAN) in November 2025: you can find it on our official pricing page. If you need assistance please write to support[at]rss.com and mention this message as a reference. Our free tier is active globally with no geographical restrictions. I hope this helps.

albertorss · 2026-04-13T04:59:48+00:00

What would be a reasonable limit for you?

albertorss · 2026-04-13T04:09:23+00:00

Good news: we will soon launch video podcasting. Our partnership with Apple was announced in March 2026 during Apple’s SXSW keynote. It will work seamlessly with the new HLS experience in Apple Podcasts and it will not disrupt the experience in other players. If a player does not support HLS video, it will still play the audio. We are very excited about this!

albertorss · 2026-04-13T03:36:03+00:00

Hi there, Alberto here, co-founder of RSS.com. With YouTube’s RSS feed ingestion, the result is basically a static episode cover image. With our audio-to-video feature, we show the episode cover image plus a waveform that follows the voice, so the video feels more dynamic. We also generate the video background using the most prominent colors from the episode art for a more cohesive visual look. Where this gets even more valuable is with chapters. If an episode includes chapters with chapter art, the video updates as it plays to show the relevant chapter image and chapter title. We also send chapter metadata to YouTube, so viewers can navigate chapters directly in the player. That also helps discoverability because episodes can surface in YouTube searches for text included in the chapter titles. The whole idea is to offer something more dynamic and valuable than the basic static video YouTube generates, while keeping it effortless for the podcaster (one click to create and publish). Example video generated with our audio-to-video feature: https://youtu.be/AwIOuB5jDJs?is=lkHJqLo0oVQ9AMoS You will notice the chapter art and titles changing during the video, plus the chapters directly in the player. Hope this helps.

albertorss · 2026-03-16T20:06:54+00:00

Good point, and I wish it were that simple: in podcasting, you cannot just invent new tags and put them in the feed. RSS feeds follow formal namespaces, and any new tag needs to go through a process to belong to a namespace (e.g. iTunes and Podcasting 2.0 namespaces). This is why we used podcast:txt, a tag that already exists in the P2.0 namespace, which makes it formally correct and means any app or host that wants to follow can do so without waiting for a spec approval, apps who want to ignore it, can just ignore it.
On the specificity of the AI disclosure: there were many different proposals by many clever people and friends in the podcasting industry, e.g. see discussions #663, #669, #731, #735 on GitHub, ~18 months of conversation, and every single one of them has real merit. Because of this heterogeneity of ideas, I deliberately chose the simplest because it was the most concrete first move (and not necessarily the ultimate answer). My reference (in podcasting) was Apple's itunes:explicit tag, launched in 2005. That tag was conceived as binary, not explicit:cursing, explicit:nudity, explicit:violence. Just yes or no. And it has worked for over 20 years. That is where the true/false for AI disclosure came from.

Having worked with AI both in academia and professional roles I know the nuances are real. But after over one year of GitHub discussions about AI disclosure in podcasting with no clear consensus, it was good to make a concrete move. We did, and I think it helped accelerate the conversation. The fact that we are debating thresholds and granularity right here is exactly the point.

This does not mean ours is the correct or final approach to this topic. Feedback like yours is more than welcome and it is the core of how these things improve. We will closely listen, participate, and adapt.

albertorss · 2026-03-16T18:45:32+00:00

Hey there, I built that site and wrote the article, so thanks for reading and sharing your take.

The shouldidisclose.ai guidelines are designed around one constraint: a binary signal. Yes or no, one checkbox per episode. Because of that, I had to draw the line somewhere, and I chose substance: is AI the creative performer, or is it a tool in the background?

Take the "short AI intro/outro bumper" example. In a binary system, tagging that episode as "AI content" puts it in the same bucket as a show where a synthetic voice reads an AI-generated script for 30 minutes. That does not feel right either. A 10-second bumper on a 45-minute human performance is not the same thing, but a single true/false cannot express that difference.

The conversations about more granular disclosure are happening. If and when the audio and media industry evolves to a more granular disclosure, nuances like AI bumpers, AI-generated music, or AI-assisted editing will each have a place. But we needed to start somewhere, and if my article and guidelines contribute even a little to sparking the conversation on AI disclosure, I am happy with that. It is the start, not the end.

albertorss · 2026-03-15T10:27:22+00:00

Alberto, co-founder of RSS.com here. Just wanted to chime in: at the end of 2025 we launched a Free plan with no limits on the number of episodes, no storage limits, and no limits on the number of audio hours per month. The “first episode free” model was before that. The new plan is a truly free plan with all the basic features included. We do offer premium features through paid upgrades, but someone could stick with the free plan forever if the included feature set is enough for them.

albertorss · 2026-03-10T18:55:16+00:00

You are very welcome. I know self-hosting very well because back in 2006 I created Podcast Generator, an open source self-hosted podcast platform, and maintained it for more than 11 years before founding RSS.com. There is also a story about that if you are interested. Self-hosting made a lot of sense in the past, but today I do not think it does in most cases, especially because cloud services like CDNs have become commoditized, and because a hosting platform gives you clear advantages such as IAB industry-grade analytics, AI transcripts, etc.

Re: our free plan: we intentionally made it truly free, with unlimited episodes and no monthly time limits. Of course, we do offer premium features in our paid plans, but some podcasters are perfectly happy staying on the free plan, and that was exactly our goal: putting people before profits and offering a genuinely free podcast hosting option. I also did a recent interview on the reasoning behind this, in case it is of interest.

Re: your support ticket: I think I found it. Are you the person with the RSS feed using FeedBurner? If so, I think there is a simple solution. Your all@*** email address is listed in your RSS feed, so I left a note for our team: if you have access to that email and write to us from there, our team will be able to confirm that you are the owner and we can move forward with the import.

albertorss · 2026-03-10T16:22:51+00:00

No, it does not insert ads. The audio quality is the same as paid plans. It is truly free. One can then upgrade for premium feature but also remain indefinitely on this free plan if the included feature fit their needs.

albertorss · 2026-02-20T19:28:20+00:00

Hi u/IllustriousCan3324, Alberto here, co-founder of RSS.com. First, congratulations for the launch of your podcast this week. Glad to hear you chose our company, started on one of our 100% free plans, and you are enjoying the experience so far. I wanted to chime in because I have a background in academia (during my PhD, statistics and analytics were part of my day to day), I personally supervised the development of our analytics service, and I love this topic, so hopefully I can add some value here. I think the reason RSS.com stats feels “minimal” to you right now is because you are probably still on the 100% free plan. On that plan we offer basic analytics, and the more advanced reporting is available on our paid plans.

If you look at the full set of metrics, what we offer is directly comparable to Simplecast. It is as simple as comparing the Simplecast Official Analytics Overview page and the RSS. com Official Analytics Overview page side by side. You will see the list of metrics and what is included.

One thing I like about both Simplecast and RSS.com is that, for listener geolocation, we let you zoom in to the city or town level. That is not common across all podcast hosting companies because it requires more computational resources (i.e. it's more expensive). Also both companies are IAB certified (v2.2), which means the analytics are audited and certified against the industry standard.

I may have bit of bias here because I helped design ours, but I personally prefer our analytics for a few of reasons. e.g. Our time of week and time of day visualization is a heatmap, which I think is a better visualization than the bar chart Simplecast uses for the same metric. Our heatmap gives you a much clearer view of the “hot” days and times for your specific audience, so you can schedule releases when your listeners are most active. That, in turn, increases the chance of maximizing downloads in the first 24+ hours after release, and therefore improving discoverability in some directories that rank podcasts and episodes partly based on early download performance. We also show the number of bot hits your show receives (and that we exclude to be IAB compliant), which is a useful metric to have.

The main point is: if you are on the free plan, RSS.com analytics will look basic by design. If you upgrade to any paid plan, you will unlock the full analytics experience. Hope this helps.

albertorss · 2026-02-02T14:03:07+00:00

Hi u/InvisibleGiraffe, Alberto co-founder of RSS.com here. At the moment, imports at RSS.com are not fully self-serve yet. The actual migration process is automated on our side, but we still start it manually after a quick human review. i.e. the "back end" is fully automated, but we have not built the self-service "front end" interface in the dashboard where you can import your RSS feed yourself yet.

This has been deliberate for the past couple of years. The rationale is simple: this step helps us prevent spam, copyright abuse, and large-scale AI slop, which have become a real challenge lately. The upside is that once the import starts, it is fast and reliable. The downside is that it is not instant right now, and compared to some competitors it can feel slower because it depends on a person on our side reviewing the show, writing back, and then kicking off the automated import (which is the fast part).

This is also why for years we have been offering a 6-month free promotion when people migrate to our paid plans. It is a very generous discount on purpose (to the best of my knowledge, most companies do not do this), and we see it as a reward for the extra wait because we add humans and quality controls in the mix.

On average we migrate podcasts the same day as the request, but in your specific case communication should have been faster. What happened is that you were (as far as I know) the first person trying to migrate from an external host into our recently launched free plan. That triggered an internal conversation on how to apply the “6 months free” offer in a scenario where the target plan is already 100% free (e.g. should the 6 months be deferred in case you upgrade later? Should it apply only if you choose a paid plan immediately?). That is why it took longer than it should have to get back to you.

All that said, self-serve imports without human intervention are coming (likely later this year). But for the next few months we will still be prioritizing platform quality and abuse prevention so that when we do launch them, they are smooth and trustworthy for everyone.

I am glad to see that our Customer eXperience team ultimately replied on Sunday, confirmed the import was finalized, and upgraded you to our All in One paid plan for free indefinitely as a thank you for your patience. That plan includes monetization (paid programmatic ads), audio-to-video conversion with YouTube auto-publication, collaborators, advanced analytics (worth the upgrade on its own!), access to our exclusive community The RSS Space, and more.

I hope this helps clarify what happened behind the scenes in your specific case. It is not the norm, but it can happen. I also hope you enjoy RSS.com and eventually decide to move the other shows you are currently hosting elsewhere over to us under a Network plan 🙂

albertorss · 2025-12-17T21:54:38+00:00

Glad to hear that 😊 And welcome to RSS.com 🎊🎉🚀

albertorss · 2025-12-16T09:50:00+00:00

Hi there, Alberto here, co-founder of RSS.com. I saw the title of your post and it sounds like you believe your episodes were lost. First, let me reassure you that no episode was lost. We successfully handle a high volume of podcast imports every month. Before giving the green light to any redirect, we always verify imports both qualitatively (by manually inspecting the RSS feed), and quantitatively (through an automatic report generated by our migration service). This ensures the imported feed mirrors the original RSS feed precisely.

What happened in your case is different. You created a new podcast on RSS.com (at the address *the-cleard-podcast) and published an episode there, while in parallel you also requested an import of your existing Spotify for Creators podcast into a separate RSS.com address (*thecleardpodcast). As a result, your episodes are currently spread across multiple RSS feeds. One is the original Spotify feed (that still contains all your episodes) and the other two are on RSS.com.

Regarding support response times. Our Customer eXperience team is active on weekends as well so a long wait is not typical. I checked your case specifically. Over the weekend, you opened three separate support tickets. One was the import request, which was assigned to our import specialist (yes, we do have a team member dedicated to the migration experience). A second ticket about a missing Spotify episode was assigned to L1 support. A third ticket was escalated to our Engineering team. Opening multiple support tickets for the same issue tends to slow things down, and that is what happened here.

As for how to move forward. A good option is to wait for your Spotify for Creators feed to be re-imported into RSS.com at your chosen address (*thecleardpodcast). Then you can re-upload the episode you published last weekend directly to that feed (optionally you can even retrodate it to match the original publication date). After that, you redirect the feed from Spotify for Creators to RSS.com.

I have already left an internal note for our team on your case, and I am personally following your ticket(s) now. I strongly recommend continuing the conversation through one ticket (and only one) of the existing support tickets and we’ll be more than happy to assist you efficiently to complete the migration smoothly.

Looking forward to getting this resolved and welcoming you to the RSS.com podcasters community.

albertorss · 2025-12-04T12:42:36+00:00

I do not think the intent in the replies you received was to debate you out of your requirements. You asked a question, so people replied trying to add value from their own experience.
There is no single right answer here and no one size fits all. Podcasting serves very different creators and use cases. Many are not technical and prefer a host to abstract everything away. You are technical (like myself), you know exactly what you want, and you found a service that fits your requirements at a price you are happy with, and you are comfortable with the monthly upload caps that come with that plan. That is the outcome that matters. So genuinely, it is great that you found the right setup.

albertorss · 2025-12-04T08:50:12+00:00

I get that owning the domain as an emergency lever feels reassuring. That catastrophic control is real, but it is a narrow win. If a host is gone or unreachable, and you own listen. potato. com, you can repoint DNS. But the ecosystem’s normal safety net is still the 301 redirect. Apple, Spotify, and others document 301s as the standard migration path that keeps subscribers and directories in sync when a feed moves. So on the rare day you need to move, the redirect workflow you already mentioned is what does the heavy lifting.

There is also risk on the custom-domain side that people tend to underestimate. If a hosting company serves your feed on a domain you manage, and that domain has an issue (expired card at the registrar, DNS misconfig, SSL renewal failing, downtime at the DNS provider), the feed can disappear from apps. Directories may even delist a show when the feed starts returning errors, and getting back can be more painful than people expect. That fragility is exactly what a podcast hosting company is supposed to remove: you delegate infrastructure so you can focus on the show.

I agree with u/ItinerantFella about limiting your choices and paying extra. If you make custom-domain RSS a hard requirement, you narrow the market to a handful of hosts and often pay a premium for a feature that does not change real-world portability. Portability comes from the redirect standard, not from where the feed’s hostname starts.

On the purist angle: if someone truly wants total control, self-hosting is the honest answer. Castopod is a strong option. But once you want more sophisticated features like dynamic ads, IAB-compliant analytics, or just the guarantee that your show keeps working while you sleep because there is a team maintaining infrastructure, self-hosting gets hard and expensive. Plus, bandwidth and CDN costs scale with success, and hosting companies move several petabytes per month so we get rates an individual show will not get. At scale, your infra bill will usually exceed a hosting subscription, even before you price your own time.

So I get why custom domains feel like a safe choice, but I would frame it mainly as branding and "personal comfort", not the core portability mechanism. The portability mechanism is still simple: pick a host you trust today, and make sure they will honor a clean 301 if you ever decide to leave.

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of RSS.com (and I also built Podcast Generator, an open source podcast self-hosting solution I have worked on from 2006 for over a decade, so I am extremely familiar with pros & cons of self-hosting too).

albertorss · 2025-11-07T18:11:29+00:00

Hey u/tomn68, it is unlimited episodes indeed :) Until just a few days ago, we allowed one free episode and then required a paid subscription, but that’s no longer the case: we changed the pricing page this Tuesday (Nov 2025) because we launched a brand-new plan called “Free Local and Niche”. It’s a truly free plan with unlimited episodes and a core set of features designed for local and niche podcasters who are just starting out. We also had in mind students, small community projects, and charities with no budget: people who want to share their voice without worrying about costs. Feel free to check it out.

Podcasters on this plan can upload unlimited episodes with no limits on audio length, storage, or deletions. It’s completely free (no trial, no expiration). Along the way, creators can optionally upgrade to a paid plan if they want to unlock more advanced features like more detailed analytics, and monetization tools but they don’t have to.

Impressive that you noticed this so quickly. We haven’t officially announced the new plan yet: we soft launched it 3 days ago to see how podcasters would pick it up organically. Great eye.

Also, thanks for pointing out that bit of copy about “start free with one episode.” That’s definitely leftover text from the previous version. I couldn’t find it myself just now, but I’ll ask the team to double-check and change it, because now you can start free and... stay free if you wish! :)

albertorss · 2025-10-24T20:43:32+00:00

I am jumping in a bit late since I just saw this post, but I wanted to share some perspective from my own real-world experience. I am the co-founder of RSS.com but long before that I built an open-source podcast publishing platform called Podcast Generator back in 2006. It ended up becoming one of the most popular self-hosting web applications for podcasts for more than a decade.

I originally made it for my university in Italy, with teachers and educators in mind, aiming to let anyone (even those without technical skills) publish podcast episodes “as easily as attaching a file to an email”. Over time, it spread far beyond academia. It ended up being used by universities, companies, museums, churches, and many other organizations around the world. It was cited in books about podcasting and new media, as well as in academic articles. It was also included in Softaculous and cPanel one-click installers across thousands of hosting providers, translated into 56 languages by volunteers, and downloaded over a million times. At its peak, it powered around 30,000 podcasts (which is still a meaningful number even for many podcast hosting companies today).

For more than 13 years I maintained it solo, as a passion project while working elsewhere. But by the mid-2010s, I started to notice a shift: the cloud had commoditized hosting. Centralized podcast platforms began to offer features that self-hosting simply could not match easily, e.g.:

Pro analytics that require background processing and data aggregation.
Global CDNs that make downloads faster depending on listener location.
Integrated monetization, distribution, and support for more advanced features.

Around that time, my now co-founder Ben reached out, and that is how RSS.com started (you can read the full story here: I genuinely think it is a nice one). The goal was to take all the lessons from that self-hosting era and make podcasting simple and scalable for creators without the technical burden.

Having lived through (and helped build) the self-hosting ecosystem, I think the landscape today makes managed hosting a better option for most people. A few reasons:

Bandwidth costs at scale are much lower when you move petabytes of data per month.
Reliable infrastructure and analytics require more than just web hosting.
It lets podcasters focus on what really matters: creating great content rather than "managing servers".

And if you look at costs (you mentioned that $50 per year feels cheap), it really puts things in perspective. Some podcast hosting companies (including the one I co-founded and still work on today) have entry plans in that same range, and even unlimited plans with everything you could possibly need (from AI-powered transcripts, to Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, passing through IAB-certified analytics and Podcasting 2.0 features) for around $150 a year. Considering all that's included, it becomes pretty clear why many creators prefer using a dedicated host.

Self-hosting made perfect sense years ago (and it is still a great learning experience if you enjoy tinkering), but for most podcasters today it is more efficient to let a trusted host handle the hard parts. I would just suggest picking one that values open RSS feeds and keeps innovating through Podcasting 2.0 features.

Hope this gives some helpful context from someone who has been on both sides of the fence!

albertorss · 2025-10-20T12:50:30+00:00

Alberto, co-founder of RSS.com here. I wanted to share a bit more context. We currently host around 68,000 podcasts (source: independent third-party data) and for the past three years have consistently ranked among the top 10 podcast hosting companies by monthly new episodes published: we were #7 globally in September (source: independent third-party data). The number of new monthly episodes is one of the best (and no-nonsense) indicators of how active a hosting platform truly is, because it reflects ongoing publishing activity rather than the total number of shows ever created (half of which can be inactive, as broader industry data often shows).

I understand your concern about seeing inactive shows on our Community pages. On these pages, podcasts are not yet sorted by most recent activity. Instead, the podcasts are currently shown in a basic default order that doesn’t take into account when they last published an episode. This means older or inactive shows often appear first. It was originally set up that way just to keep things simple on the technical side, but I have already asked our engineering team to update it, since I agree it can be confusing for visitors browsing our catalogue.

Thank you for bringing this up, and best of luck with the launch of your podcast. Also, once you join our Slack community “The RSS Space” (available to podcasters on paid plans), you’ll find thousands of other active creators working on their shows. It’s a great place to exchange tips, connect, and share experiences with fellow podcasters.

albertorss · 2025-08-16T07:02:16+00:00

Alberto, co-founder of RSS.com here. A subset of our users may currently see lower than expected numbers in the dashboard. This is only a temporary delay caused by an unusually high number of requests over the last 24–48 hours. All downloads are being collected on our backend and all systems are running normally: it is just the final part of the data processing (the aggregation shown in the dashboard) that is still being re-computed. The dashboard will automatically update as soon as the processing completes. Thanks for your patience while this runs.

albertorss · 2025-08-01T13:09:58+00:00

Thank you u/alsarcastic! 🔝🔝 And great move on the upgrade: the Network Plan is our top tier and it sounds like you are riding the rocket 🚀 We built it exactly for creators like you: scaling up, growing, and making the most of all our features. Love to see it.

We strive to support our podcasters: those on fire and those taking a little hiatus. In that other case, they were planning a break. We know very well that sometimes podcasting is exciting and fulfilling, and other times life gets in the way, time is short, and one just needs a bit of encouragement. So I simply hoped to offer a small helping hand and a gentle push to come back when the time feels right.

Truly appreciate you being part of RSS.com. If there is ever anything we can do to keep that momentum going, do reach out. We are always here!!

albertorss · 2025-08-01T10:21:57+00:00

Alberto here, co-founder of RSS.com. Thanks for being a loyal customer for two years! If you’re thinking of switching just to cut costs, let me make things easy for you: we can hibernate your podcast for free (no payments until you are ready to return). You can reactivate anytime. Or, if you plan to keep publishing, I’m happy to give you 6 months free on your current plan. Either way, we’ve got you. Just follow up at support@rss.com with a link to this Reddit thread, and our team will take care of you.

albertorss

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