Your podcast in Podnews
Podnews has a set of podcast search pages, primarily to help us link to podcasts that we write about.
These pages use the direct public RSS feed. We do not alter or edit the information available within the RSS feed, and give publishers the option to force an update for their information whenever they’d like. It is the primary use of a podcaster’s RSS feed, which exists to syndicate podcast descriptions and a link to the audio to public websites such as ours.
We link directly to the audio from each podcast host in an IABv2-compliant fashion: it does not pre-load audio. All plays of audio from these pages appear as a play on the podcast’s own podcast host. We do not alter any of the audio. Our pages are clear that we are not the author.
We do not have any advertisements or paid promotion on any of our podcast pages. We do not require login to use them.
There are many other podcast directories that pull information from public RSS feeds. Some auto-discover RSS feeds from the internet; some require submission.
We use RSS feeds in the way that they are designed to be used: to link to content elsewhere on the internet.
You can remove your podcast from public listings by a) marking your podcast as not available outside the Apple Podcasts system within the Apple Podcasts Connect service, and then changing the RSS feed address to one marked as non-spiderable; or b) removing your podcast from the open internet altogether. Our pages auto-update every 14 days, and can be triggered to update on-demand.
DMCA requests
We have a full DMCA request procedure.
However - DMCA offers no right to confidentiality in any requests, and we will disregard any confidentiality requirement. We regard misuse of the DMCA for podcast directories shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet, and particularly podcasts, work. We view DMCA requests as without merit and vexatious.
“You are linking to bad/awful/illegal content”
Podnews podcast pages are entirely automated from the RSS feed and other data sources.
The only way anyone will find an individual podcast is by searching for it: so listeners need to know a name of a podcast to discover it. We don’t algorithmically surface or promote any show without editorial control.
All links are marked with rel=“ugc” which means that Google doesn’t use them for pagerank, either - so there’s no benefit for naughty/illegal podcasts from our automated page.
Since pages are invisible unless they are deliberately searched for, while it’s accurate to say that we list all types of podcast on our service, there’s no risk that anyone will happen upon them by accident.