Death of Stitcher: a perfect lesson of how podcasters should future-proof their distribution, syndication and promotion

Stitcher (originally called Stitcher Smart Radio) which began in 2008, just announced that it will voluntarily end operations on August 29, 2023. However, this article isn’t so much about the end of Stitcher, but the moral of the story (or la moraleja, if you speak Castilian) for podcasters regarding the best way to distribute, syndicate and promote ourselves in future-proof ways. As a 2x award-winning podcaster and consultant since 2008, I have observed too many fellow podcasters who mainly promote vulnerable platforms like Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and countless more, instead of mainly promoting their podcast’s own website and their own Branded RSS. Too many fellow podcasters even do that audibly during their show, where they will never find time to re-edit and re-publish episodes from their back catalog, where they were promoting platforms which, in some cases no longer exist, instead of promoting their show’s own website with its own domain, which can potentially exist forever as long as it’s paid.

My strategies and recommendations to all podcasters (those who are my clients and host with TecnoTur or not) is:

• Use a Branded RSS feed, where the RSS feed contains the show’s own domain name, not anyone else’s. Of course, host your podcast on one of the few podcast hosts that allow for Branded RSS, be it TecnoTur or another one.
• Syndicate your show to as many podcast platforms as possible using your Branded RSS feed, with the primary goal of making the show be discovered by listeners who don’t know us yet.
• Primarily promote the show’s own website with its own domain, not vulnerable podcast platforms (especially within the audio content of the show and in the episode notes).

Why?

• Our show’s own website is the only platform that we can absolutely guarantee will continue to exist in the future.
• Other platforms like Stitcher (which has already announced its own death), Google Podcasts (which has already downscaled itself from its prior wonderful feature set to a much simpler one) may not exist in the future… or may decide to charge us an unaffordable amount of money to continue to be syndicated there.

Examples

The following examples can be with your own voice or with a third-party professional voice talent. I use a combination of these on my shows:

• «Sonríe queridooyente, estás escuchando CapicúaFM en CapicúaFM.com. Allí es donde puedes escuchar todos los episodios pasados, presentes y futuros en CapicúaFM.com».
• «Smile, you’re listening to BeyondPodcasting at BeyondPodcasting.com. That’s where you can listen to all past, present and future episodes at BeyondPodcasting.com.»
• «Smile, you’re listening to YourShow.com at YourShow.com. That’s where you can listen to all past, present and future episodes at YourShow.com.»

Conclusions

By only promoting our own associated website within the show content itself, our precious evergreen audio recordings will be futureproof. (Many listeners still consume old episodes after searching on a topic listed in the episode title or in the episode notes.) Of course, we can have — and should still have — links on the show’s website to some of those podcast syndication platforms. The website can be updated to remove obsolete links infinitely more easily than re-recording and re-editing old episodes. (It took me less than 33 seconds for me to remove the Stitcher link from my podcast websites like CapicúaFM and BeyondPodcasting. I am so glad I never promoted Stitcher in any audio recordings.) But even those links on the podcast’s dedicated website should be much less prominent than other valuable content on that page. Getting visitors to our website and listening directly from there is the holy grail, since there, the only distractions we place there are things that are very important to us. Sending visitors elsewhere (where we can easily be forgotten) makes no sense. The only exception which I continue to recommend is Pocket Casts, for reasons I have covered in prior articles.

For more information, visit TecnoTur.

Lee este artículo en castellano

Fin de Stitcher: una perfecta lección de cómo los podifusores deben organizar la distribución y promoción a prueba de los cambios del futuro