Better Podcast Support

  • dbspin · Member ·

    Yes I know it’s been raised before.

    Here’s the thing… WordPress.com has the opportunity to be the best place to host and distribute podcasts online. The hard stuff is already done – rock solid web hosting, generous media plans, easy to use interface, variety of customisable themes. In fact, thousands of podcasts use wordpress to host their sites – but for the most part, they’re using wordpress.org.

    A small amount of new features could radically improve WordPress.com as a platform for podcasting (and as a podcaster, I’d be happy to pay more for them – as would thousands of audio creators).

    1 – Better feed management. WordPress already has great support for RSS. For example, being able to produce a separate feed for each tag lets you host multiple podcasts from one wordpress.com account. Something none of the other alternatives allow. However, wordpress.com lacks support for the custom feed enclosures required by itunes (and now supported by most podcast clients). Third party services like Google’s (perhaps doomed) Feedburner are necessitated to use wordpress.com to deliver podcasts . More importantly, the 50 post limit on wordpress posts is a major impediment to podcasters – many of whom have archives of hundreds of episodes, all counting towards their statistics.

    2. Media Statistics

    Libsyn is expensive. Really expensive if you’re producing more than a moderate amount of content. Why do people use it? Libsyn (and services like Blubrry) provide reasonable download statistics. Media download statistics are a necessity to obtain advertising. Even for those podcasters who (like myself) would never consider including advertising in their programming, knowing how many downloads each episode gets is an essential motivation. It is as or more important than page counts are to a blogger, and right now non-existent on wordpress.com

    3. Subscription Options

    This ones a little less obvious, because no other service is doing it well. When a web visitor arrives at a site hosting a podcast, there’s no elegant way to provide subscription options. We’re still in the era of providing ‘chiclet’ web buttons listing podcast clients and RSS feeds. Services like podlove are working to solve this and similar problems (deep linking to podcast content, chapters, responsive design for feeds). WordPress could own this space – making podcasts much simpler to subscribe to. At the same time, this could drive traffic to the wordpress.com community, as listeners are encouraged to subscribe or even listen through wordpress itself; in the same way they subscribe to blogs today.

    4. End to end solution

    Podcasting is still too hard. For the platform to reach it’s potential – as a way for millions of people to express themselves and communicate their ideas – it needs to get much easier. Why is it hard? All of the elements are separate. You need one solution to record, another to edit and a third to distribute. It needn’t be that way. If a company with the resources and technical talent of wordpress were to provide an end to end distribution solution (as described above), it could serve as a bedrock for a dead simple recording / editing / uploading platform. Such a solution, in the form of a smartphone and tablet app, could have the same impact that WYSIWYG interfaces did for blogging in the early 2000s: increasing the number of people with the technical knowhow to create podcasts by several orders of magnitude. When podcasting was first conceived Dave Winer spent a number of years trying to build a hardware device to do just this. Now, we all have the hardware in our pockets – it’s the software side, the integration of production and hosting, that’s missing.

    5. Advertising

    I’m sure wordpress management have considered all the above possibilities and more. Perhaps they’ve rejected them because of the lower profitability of hosting media rich content. However, a service that provided all of the above, would have access to unprecedented amounts of solid data about the popularity and listenership of the podcasts it provided. It could potentially fulfil an arbitrage role with advertisers worth a significant amount – providing a useful (and profitable) service to both podcasters and advertisers alike. It could also support delivery and subscription to premium content, and other monitisation options still too complex for most podcasters and listeners to implement / access.

    As a user of the site, I’m endlessly frustrated by a solution that’s 80% of the way towards being the perfect podcast delivery platform, but shows no inclination to close the gap. Please wordpress, give some thoughts to supporting podcasting – both as a way to stay relevant as more and more people create rich media content, and as a new revenue steam.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • timethief · Member ·

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  • estranhow · Member ·

    I totally agree with all your points.
    The core problem for me is the 50 post limit to podcast feed. Sounds something so simple to change but yet here we are, with an incomplete podcast on iTunes.

  • amightywp · Member ·

    Hi there,

    Thanks very much for your feedback. As you mentioned, this is something which has been raised before and we have a roadmap to put more podcast-friendly tools in place, however we do not have an ETA in place for implementing these improvements.

    I would recommend you posting these suggestions to our Ideas forum, as this is regularly checked to see what is being asked for:

    https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/ideas

  • estranhow · Member ·

    Hi! Thanks for your response.

    Amightwp, do you have, at least any prediction for the feed size limit? This seems to be a problem with a simple solution for you guys and would help a lot.

  • dbspin · Member ·

    Hey @amightywp – this was posted to the ideas forum… You can see the forum name at the top of the thread.

  • amightywp · Member ·

    So it was, @dbspin! I apologize. I don’t often get asked to moderate items from the ideas forum and so I didn’t see that. Thanks for pointing it out to me. :)

    And @estranhow, I’m afraid I can’t comment on any feature which hasn’t been released. We are constantly changing configurations and release dates for the simplest of things, and so we have a pretty solid policy to not comment on anything until it is out and available to our users. I’m sorry.

  • mrdragonbeard · Member ·

    As a podcaster the 50 limit syndication is a deal breaker. I can not remain with wp.com if this isn’t uncapped. Can anyone tell me why allowing more than 50 is such a problem for wp?
    I’d really rather not move.

  • amightywp · Member ·

    I’m afraid that much like my answer previously, I don’t have an answer as to why the 50 post limit was implemented over some higher (or lower) limit. Any answer I gave would be a guess and I don’t want to just give you guesses.

    As I mentioned, this is something which we are looking at rolling out improvements to, but we do not have a timeframe for yet. I’m sorry for that inconvenience.

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