About p0dcasters
Podcasting was designed as an open format: an RSS feed at a URL you control. Most of it no longer works that way. Of the 4.7 million feeds in the Podcast Index, roughly 40% sit on a single host — Spotify's Anchor — and the ten largest hosts account for about three quarters of everything.
This directory is the remainder: 21,607 shows on 13,404 distinct domains, together 3,354,187 episodes. Every one publishes from a domain its creator controls.
What gets in?
Starting from the Podcast Index public database, a feed is listed when it:
- returned HTTP 200 on the last fetch, and published within the last 90 days;
- is not on a hosting platform or broadcaster — defined as any domain carrying 25 or more live feeds, which removes 308 domains including every major host;
- has at least three episodes, plus a title, description and artwork;
- isn't a bulk-dump content farm — feeds averaging ten or more episodes a day over their lifetime are excluded.
Why not just rank by popularity?
The obvious move is to rank feeds by how popular their domain is. It doesn't work: 93% of live feeds already sit on a domain in the global top million, because they're all on the same twenty platforms. That measures Spotify's traffic, never the show. Worse, the domains absent from those rankings are precisely the independent ones — so ranking that way buries exactly what's worth finding. It is used here inverted, as one signal for identifying platforms to exclude.
How are shows ordered?
Shows are ranked by catalogue depth and longevity, weighted by recency — not by raw recency alone. Sorting purely by newest episode hands the top of every page to whoever publishes most often, which in practice means automated feeds.
Where does the data come from?
Metadata comes from the Podcast Index. The full directory is available as OPML, which any podcast app can import. Nothing here is hosted by us: every link points at the publisher.
What does it cost?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier to upgrade to. An account is free and optional: it exists so you can follow shows and keep that list across devices, and it stores an email address and a list of slugs — see privacy. You can browse, search, play and export the whole directory without one.
How do I get my show listed, or removed?
Listing is automatic: there is no submission form because nobody approves entries by hand. If your feed is in the Podcast Index and meets the rules above, it appears at the next rebuild. To be taken out, or to report metadata that is wrong, write to us — though titles, descriptions and artwork are read from your feed, so fixing the feed fixes it everywhere.