Curious about PocketCasts’ podcast feed(s)
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Hi.
Do you have any write-up or other info about how your source podcast feeds fit together? This is primarily since many podcasters often seem to be itunes-centric when asking for likes, subscriptions, or downloads. Would be useful when we users are pondering podcast feed curiosities such as:
- podcasts that are audio only yet on other platforms they contain video also.
- whether hitting “like” on a podcast or episode is contributing to the “likes” that the podcast host is seeing (for all I know, less mainstream podcasts come via feeds that don’t (reliably?) relay this information back to the source like the more mainstream ones do.
Having better visibility of these feeds might help us users do our own digging when unsure of podcast details…
Regards, Stu.
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Hi @studeimus
I’m not entirely sure what kind of information you’re looking for here. Pocket Casts uses the source RSS feed to fetch podcast content and metadata directly from the feed provided by the podcast host. This RSS feed determines the media type (audio/video). Having said that, a podcast might only include audio files in its public RSS feed while offering video versions on platforms like YouTube or Patreon.
Pocket Casts doesn’t have a ‘like’ feature, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to there. You can ‘star’ an episode, to add it to your ‘Starred episodes’, but that’s just a local feature only visible to you. You can also rate podcasts, but those ratings are not automatically relayed to the podcast host.
Hope that helps!
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Hi Donnie. Isn’t there an aggregator (or three) that have all the RSS links for each podcast? (or many of them, atleast).
Yes, I was hoping/assuming that the star function (data) was being fed back to the feed source, so they can see the number of people liking a podcast or episode.
Thanks, Stu.
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That is a good question, @studeimus
For now, that data does not go to the author, but it is something we can look into in the future
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I guess same applies to subscription to a give podcast? If the likes of PocketCasts doesn’t feed such things back to the source, then is it practically the case that subscription numbers that podcasters rely on is only based on data from the likes of itunes and Spotify? I’d like to think that my own subscriptions contribute to my podcasters also.
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@studeimus Many podcasters use tracking services like Podtrac to help them collect data about subscription numbers across different platforms. The tracking information is appended to the source feed URL.
Pocket Casts does not strip that tracking information, so authors can still get the information they need for their analytics.
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Thanks Cara! Good to know. Perhaps now it is clearer why I originally asked in this forum topic if there is a write-up somewhere about how this stuff works. A wiki write-up or other blog post would be most useful…
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@studeimus Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve added that to our to-do list so we can work on putting something together.
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