Podcast Platform Recommendation

What happens when you publish a new audio post; when Substack emails your subscribers, is the audio simply-click-and-it-plays inside my email reader? Or must I click back to Substack’s website to play the audio?

This feature of Substack really intrigues me as part of my Thoughts on Conversation newsletter. I’ve started writing on Substack and intend to start using their audio/podcast feature for the paying subscribers on Substack.

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@craigconstantine Thank you for moving the post to the right place and for your experience with Simplecast. I don’t know about namespace so great to learn about it.

@DannyvLHealthHats It’s wonderful to know about the service of Blubrry. Do you pay more when you go over 400MB? Thank you, Danny.

@Mark I don’t know about the podcast/audio feature of Substack. I am very interested in exploring further. I am curious to know if a newsletter can include text and an episode of a podcast. Thank you for your insight and recommendation.

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Yes. More over 400MB. I’ve never done that. My podcast is way more dense than yours

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Hi @AmandaB

I have limited experience with the various platforms and am no expert, but I use Podbean and one of the main reasons for choosing it, apart from the good value (when you pay the full year), is that there is no extra charge of an additional podcast (at their lowest-priced paid plan, but not on their free plan).

Cheers,
Ron

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@craigconstantine when then podcast email is sent, it looks like you can play it within the email, but it’s just a regular button “:arrow_forward: Listen now”. That button links to the podcast episode webpage where you can then click on play.

I’ve attached a screenshot of one of the emails from a podcast I set up:

When you click on ‘Listen now’ you get taken here.

It’s certainly not perfect and what I did was to put out a second email later in the same week with the rough transcript and additional content that you wouldn’t get if you are listening via a podcast player. For this particular episode, I sent this.

I hope this helps.

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THANKS! That’s super-helpful, and I think it will work just fine for what I’m imagining doing. (Sorry to hijack your topic @AmandaB :laughing:

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Danny, This is very helpful. Thanks!

@Ron Thank you for sharing your Podbean experience. It seems like a good choice with its service and pricing. I will head over and learn more about it. Thank you!

This is very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing how it works with a visual.

@craigconstantine I am just as curious as this. So thank you for asking such a good question so I can learn about it as well.

Captivate.fm and Transistor.fm are respected hosters that will give you multiple sites for one price @AmandaB

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@Jey Thank you for the resource and recommendation. This is very helpful. Love our podcast community.

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Hi Amanda, I’m currently using Podbean, and I highly recommend you also check them out here https://www.podbean.com/. For me, it’s one of the best podcast-hosting platforms right now. It’s helping me optimize and monetize my podcast. It is also a very secure platform, and its layout is surprisingly easy to use!

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This is very helpful. I am volunteering to set up a new podcast so this is very helpful. Thank you, @Martintaylor

I’d have to say that Podbean is probably the best private podcast platform today for both podcasters and audiences. Podcast content creators can use it to create better quality podcasts and even monetize their content while listeners can easily use the platform to listen to their favorite podcasters. Companies are even using Podbean for enterprises which makes it a very versatile platform in my opinion.

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@Martintaylor, can you give us a link to your podcast’s web page on Podbean? I’m curious to see what their pod pages look like…

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All three of our podcasts are hosted on Anchor (by Spotify) which is completely free. We moved over from Substack, who was also highly recommended for beginners.

We have one main need that apparently only Anchor can meet: which is segments of audio. This allows us to fix, correct, update, etc. audio components segment-by-segment. We also have transition snippets that they provide which make everything “pop”.

We looked at others. They all have quirks that we found unacceptable for our needs.

  • Some will have limits on storage. Yeah no. Anchor has no storage limit at all.
  • Some have limits on monthly # of uploads. Yeah no - we record eight times every month for two of the podcasts. We’re seeing limits of like 2-3, and that’s not a podcast in our opinion. Anchor doesn’t care.
  • Some will let you kind of “cheat” the segment audio using ad segments on their paid plan - but that’s not the same thing. With Anchor, the ad segment is a different segment, not part of the segments we upload. It’s semantics, but regardless, Anchor doesn’t charge for either.
  • Very few have transition audio snippets where Anchor does.
  • Anchor (because it’s supported by Spotify) supports video podcasts natively within the same feed. Others do not unless you pay a boatload and then you run into storage limits.

About the only thing Anchor doesn’t do (and many others don’t either) is a private podcast feed - truly private, meaning it’s not published to iTunes, it’s not even indexed through search engines. You can’t find it AT ALL unless you add the address to your app. That’s the main benefit of self-hosting - you control who sees what and who hears what. But it’s a pain to maintain it.

For us, the main thing we really want and have never found a provider to do (in addition to what Anchor does) is one that lets you bulk edit shownotes. As you migrate from podcast platforms, this becomes a real problem especially if your links change, your handles change, or there’s just text that’s no longer accurate for subscribing. No known provider offers a tool that lets you do a find-and-replace; if we were self-hosted this would be seconds worth of work, so I know it’s possible, but no provider has prioritized it, and that’s sad because we think it’s a game changer.

We think Zencastr could be a big thing in the future as they get more into full podcast provider mode.

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@Martintaylor This is very insightful. Thanks for the great share.

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This is very interesting.

I had an opportunity to do a recording on Zancastr and found it is very simple to use.

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