Podcast Platforms and Directories
Contents
Trevor L Taylor hosts Hard Truths for a Soft World, and like any podcast it reaches people through a layer of services that sit between a show and its audience. Those services fall into two broad groups. Directories list shows and point listeners to them, usually by reading each show’s public feed. Platforms go further, hosting audio or video themselves and controlling how it is presented, recommended and paid for. Many large services now do both.
Directories and platforms
A directory is essentially a catalogue. It stores a show’s feed address, reads the feed regularly, and displays the episodes it finds. Apple’s guidance for creators describes the typical gatekeeping: a show submitted from an RSS feed must meet technical requirements and include required tags, at least one episode and artwork1, and submission runs through an Apple account. Once listed, the show appears wherever that directory’s data is used.
A hosting platform holds the media file itself. Every podcast needs one, because the feed has to point to audio stored somewhere. Some hosting companies are invisible infrastructure. Others, such as YouTube or Spotify, are also places where people listen and watch, which gives them direct knowledge of their audience.
Between those two groups sit the independent listening apps. They rarely host anything themselves. Instead they search a directory, often Apple’s catalogue or an open index, and then fetch episodes straight from each show’s feed. Their existence is the practical proof that podcasting is open: a developer can build a complete listening app without signing a deal with a single publisher, and a listener can switch apps without losing anything but settings. The large services compete with these apps on convenience, recommendations and video, while the small ones compete on features and privacy.
How many shows exist
Because feeds are public, it is possible to estimate the size of the medium. Podnews reported that the Podcast Index, built largely by discovering open podcast RSS feeds on the web2, counted 3.8 million podcasts in early 2023, while the Apple Podcasts catalogue was estimated at around 2.5 million. Many of those shows are dormant or were made once as experiments, so the number of actively publishing podcasts is far smaller than the catalogue totals suggest.
Apple and the first front door
For most of the medium’s history Apple was the main way in. In June 2005 the company built podcast subscriptions into iTunes 4.9 with more than 3,000 free shows at launch3, and its directory soon became the reference catalogue that many other apps relied on.
Apple ran that role with a light touch, reading open feeds rather than hosting shows, but its reach gave it outsized influence. Writing for Nieman Lab, Nicholas Quah noted that Apple, long a hands off steward of the space4, still shaped collective decisions in an ecosystem that described itself as open. When Apple adopted a tag or changed a requirement, the rest of the industry tended to follow.
Spotify and the exclusive
Spotify entered as a music service and set out to make podcasts a reason to stay. Its most visible move was paying for exclusive rights. The New York Times reported that the 2020 deal for The Joe Rogan Experience, publicly described at the time as worth more than $100 million, was actually worth at least $200 million over three and a half years5, and noted that the show was already a major hit on YouTube before it moved.
Exclusives changed the relationship between platforms and shows. Instead of reading a public feed, the platform held the only copy, which let it control advertising and data but removed the show from other apps. The episode illustrates the central tension of the medium: openness spreads a show widely, while exclusivity concentrates its value in one place.
YouTube’s rise
The largest change of recent years came from video. YouTube says it has passed 1 billion monthly podcast users6 and describes itself as the service people in the United States use most for podcasts. Independent survey data supports that ranking. Net Influencer, summarizing Edison Research’s latest figures, reported that 39 percent of weekly podcast consumers most often use YouTube7, against 20 percent for Spotify and 11 percent for Apple Podcasts.
YouTube’s model differs from a directory’s. Most podcasts on the service are uploaded as video rather than read from a feed, and they are surfaced by the same recommendation system that serves every other video. That brings huge reach and a different kind of audience, one that may not think of what it is watching as a podcast at all.
When a platform closes
Platforms can disappear, which is a strong argument for the open feed. In 2023 Google announced it would fold Google Podcasts into YouTube Music, citing data that 23 percent of weekly podcast users named YouTube as their most used service against 4 percent for Google Podcasts8. YouTube promised a migration tool, the ability to add RSS feeds to YouTube Music, and an export of subscriptions for listeners who preferred another app. Trusted Reviews reported that the old app shut down on April 2, 20249.
Because the shows lived on public feeds, listeners could carry their libraries elsewhere. A podcast that existed only inside Google’s app would simply have vanished.
Streaming and television
The newest entrants come from television. Axios reported that Netflix would begin carrying selected Spotify video podcasts in early 202610, that Amazon had added a popular sports podcast to Prime Video, and that SiriusXM was signing shows with strong video versions. Podcasts are becoming programming for living room screens, distributed by licensing deals much like television series.
Choosing where to publish
For a new show the practical approach follows from this history. Publish an RSS feed from a reliable host, because the feed is what reaches Apple, most independent apps and services that accept feeds. Submit it to the major directories so listeners can find it wherever they search. Decide separately whether a video version is worth producing for YouTube and other video services, since those audiences arrive through recommendations rather than subscriptions. Treat any exclusive arrangement as a trade of reach for money or support.
The result is a layered system. Podcast platforms and directories act as storefronts, each with its own audience, rules and measurement, arranged around one shared open feed that keeps a show portable when any single storefront changes.
