Syndicating to podcast platforms

What is syndication ?

We always recommend that publishers send users directly to their own website or app when driving listenership campaigns, but the podcast eco system consist of various large "syndicators" which can deliver podcast content from our platform to their listeners. The biggest of these are Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Syndication is an important way to make your show available to a wider audience by reaching audiences in the apps they already use.

In most cases this happens via "pass-through" where the other platform still delivers the audio file directly from our servers to their listener, allowing usage analytics and ad insertion features to work.

How it works

Every podcast show has an RSS feed, which is just an XML file with all the show details and a list of it's episodes. This XML file is updated every time new episodes become available, and any 3rd party software can read this file to check for new episodes.

There is a lot more technical details, such as different XML "namespaces" and metadata fields, but in general only two are important for an RSS feed to work with most platforms:

• Apple's "Podcast RSS feed requirements" ,
• Podcasting 2.0 namespace.

Our platform fully supports both of these in our feeds.

How to start syndication

After creating a channel/show on our platform, an RSS feed URL will automatically become available to it.

Our platform also allows adding extra parameters to this URL that can select the audio file type and quality level. This means customers can for example send "AAC" files into Apple's eco-system, but older "MP3" into Spotify.

The channel's "Edit" form contains a "Syndication" section that contains this information:

We provide a URL to use for Spotify (which requires MP3) and another feed that should work well almost everywhere else (which uses AAC).

Where to syndicate

We'd recommend all customers to syndicate via at least these platforms:

• Apple. Requires a Apple Podcasts Connect account first. See their details to "Submit a show".
• Spotify. Requires a Spotify for Podcasters account. See more details.
• Player FM. Submit via the "Add to Player FM" page.
• Pocket Casts. Submit via the "Submit your podcast" page.
• PodcastIndex. Last but very important, list the show on the public PodcastIndex directory. More details.

Transferring syndication

In cases where a publisher wishes to migrate to a different podcast hosting provider, RSS feeds can be "redirected" so that any platform or application following the feed automatically updates to the new URL. This allows publishers to migrate their existing audience when changing podcast hosting providers.

When migrating to iono.fm, your existing platform should allow you to perform the redirect to your new URL after importing the show to our platform.

Our platform allows you to migrate your podcasts to other platforms via our export process.