Holy HTML Batman, check how your podcast appears in RSS readers! |
I’ve seen all kinds of different things done with podcasts over the last few years, but don’t often get pitched on Batman Ringtones instead of the podcast itself:
What’s wrong with this picture? Besides the fact that the post and podcast doesn’t have anything to do with Batman: in Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS Readers currently in use, following the words "Listen to the podcast" there is a Google Adsense ad for Batman Ringtones. A great way to get people to click the ad if this was intentional, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
Here is what the actual post looks like if you click through to the website:
Will Steven Hodson, who refers to himself as a "cranky old fart" get cranky when he learns this? Not trying to pick on him here, rather trying to share something that’s happening with a number of podcasts out there that rely on embedded players (and other embedded widgets) that don’t show up in RSS readers. If you are a podcaster who wants more listeners, listen up.
How people are getting to your show
Before you say this is no big deal, most people follow podcasts using a podcatching app like iTunes, iPodder or Zune (the three most popular podcatching apps according to my podcast stats), ask a podcaster to check his stats. Here are stats for one of our podcasts, provided by our podcast hosting provider Libsyn:
This podcast gets 91.6% of its traffic directly from the web. "Web" could be from people clicking on the media file link inside the RSS feed and/or blog post. Moral of the story: don’t make it hard for them to find the download link.
If every reader comes to your blog post to read the post, they will see these slick embedded players, but how many people read your blog in their RSS reader of choice and never come to the website? In the pie graph above, we don’t know specifically how many clicked the link on the blog post vs. in their RSS feeder.
Since, I’ve read Steven state in the past that he doesn’t use Google Reader, I looked at the podcast post in several other RSS readers to see the results.
- Firefox - helpfully serving up the attachment as a link. No sign of the embedded player.
- IE7 - same as Firefox, no embedded player, link to the attachment provided by IE7
- Safari - also provides handy download link for attachment, the embedded player doesn’t show
- Newsgator - looks similar to Google Reader: empty white space and advertisement, this time no Batman, it’s an ad to iphonegeek. Newsgator added a link "add to my podcast" so they must have picked up on the RSS attachment.
- Bloglines - my how this once mighty RSS reader has fallen The most recent post showing is a post from yesterday at 11:49am. Guess Bloglines readers will keep waiting.
For those using the plugin, does the Podpress embedded player show up in any RSS reader? Thank goodness for feed readers that recognize the RSS attachment and provide that as a link, but I feel for podcasters who are using this plugin and missing out on listens because readers don’t or won’t clickthru to the website to get the file.
Podcaster tip: always include HTML download links in blog posts to media files
There’s an easy solution to this issue. If you aren’t including an HTML download strip with your podcasts, I’d encourage you to start doing so immediately. Especially if your podcast is mixed with normal blog posts like the one shown above.
Here’s a screenshot of the HTML download strip I use for our (now seldom updated) Hmmcast:
Notice the icons, file extensions and resolutions for the video files are shown. I’m missing the running time and file size, which would be helpful to add as well. If your podcast is audio only as shown in the example in this post, then show the file extension as .MP3 (or whatever else it is) along with file size. Although storage space is not an issue with people on their desktop machines, it can be an issue with portable devices.
With every new podcast blog post you could start by copy/pasting a strip like this into each post at the top or bottom where your readers cannot miss no matter what RSS reader they are using. Sure, this will be redundant information for RSS readers that identify the attachments, but this won’t create awkward moments of saying "listen" or "watch" this … and then there is whitespace and/or some third party advertisement.
Did this post make you go hmm?
(Hmm, no ratings yet)
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thanks for bringing this to my attention but let me clarify a couple of things. The top graphic is of the RSS feed which by the looks of it is finally carrying the new AdSense for RSS feeds from Google.
The second part is that I use PodPress for the distribution of my podcasts and its player doesn’t apparently come through in the RSS feed.
Between the combination of both those things made it look like I was telling people to play the Batman Ringtones - which couldn’t be further from the truth.
But like I said thanks for writing about this because it’s pushing me to find an alternative for podpress (which I will regret doing) because it still doesn’t have support yet for WP 2.6.1 - as well I’ll see if I can hack the RSS to provide a stronger seperation between the text and the ad.
Comment by Steven Hodson — August 22, 2008 @ 4:38 pm PST
Hi Steven - seems you already realize this, but you don’t need that bloated PodPress plugin to publish a podcast. I think you’re using Feedburner (yes?) that has excellent podcast support built-in. You just need to link up the media file in your post body and make sure FB knows it’s a podcast.
What I’d suggest doing is making a new/separate category for each show you publish and then point the podcast Feedburner feed to that category. You can still have these posts show up in your main feed but for those who subscribe to the podcast category directly, they will get the podcast-friendly version. This would also allow people to subscribe directly to the podcast and not have to subscribe to your other blog posts (but they could do that too by subscribing to the main feed).
This is what I’ve been doing with the Hmmcast here since day one and it works slick.
Comment by TDavid — August 22, 2008 @ 5:47 pm PST
Actually that is what I am right in the middle of doing right now .. just rearranging the different show podcasts into their own category under the main Podcast Category .. then I’m installing another well though of podcast plugin that is coded to work with the native WP podcast support plus it will build the feed URLs to push through feedburner. So I’ll have the main Podcast feed for all the the podcasts and then individual show feeds .. pumping them all through FeedBurner plus adding the option to download them as well as soon as I get the download counter I want (really light footprint) installed and the CSS settings to make it all look good in the posts.
Today seems to be my Admin duties day .. first spent most of the day working on the forums and now working on the blog.
BTW did you know that you can’t delete empty Categories in the 2.5.x branch of WP .. or at least every try I gave it failed
Comment by Steven Hodson — August 22, 2008 @ 6:14 pm PST
>> BTW did you know that you can’t delete empty Categories in the 2.5.x branch of WP .. or at least every try I gave it failed
No, didn’t know that. I’ve been disappointed with Wordpress “upgrades” though. They need to stop messing around trying to add new features. They are making it worse
Comment by TDavid — August 23, 2008 @ 7:05 am PST
Its time we all called the Podcast parade aint it?
I’m pretty sure the Batman ad wasn’t intentional.
IF it was, kudos to the guy who placed it there! - I’d definitely have clicked on it..
Comment by spacebm — September 15, 2008 @ 8:18 am PST
Sometimes those bot mess things up and think your feed is about something it’s not. Every software has it’s bugs. Sometimes these bugs are the result of faulty design and can only be corrected if everything is made from scratch. Other times the extra development time and costs are to high to hunt for a bug that only comes up 0.1% of the times. Making software to recognize human language is something really complicated so I don’t think it’s a surprise it’s full of bugs. The batman ad is one huge ugly bug
Comment by Bitstar — December 5, 2008 @ 6:55 am PST
Funny results shown that arent related to the subject of the post. Just like me finding this post searching for batman stuff. Anyways, you bring up a valid point. After checking my feeds I found that most my stuff doesn’t show in most aggregators. (not doing podcasts but still) Definitely annoying. I am just getting into using rss so I will make sure I check my feeds more frequently to make sure they display what I want, instead of what someone else might want.
Comment by kevin — September 12, 2009 @ 3:21 pm PST