Speed and the infrastructure to handle the volume, analytics, and much more!
Your podcast is a series of MP3 files that you've recorded. You can either edit them yourselves or Podetize can produce them for you and publish them to your RSS feed, which then gets published on all the podcast listening apps.
We have experienced customers that have hosted their podcast episodes within their own websites. It can be done, but it's not recommended for a number of reasons, especially the more popular your podcast becomes. Thousands, even tens of thousands of people, attempting to download it to their device at the same time can crash your average website.
Essentially, podcast hosts and podcast media hosts are very powerful series of web servers. In the case of Podetize, your episodes are located on servers in every country around the globe. People can download your episodes more quickly than if they requested them from a server that's halfway around the world. So one reason you want a podcast host is speed and the infrastructure to handle the volume.
Another thing that a good podcast media host does is provide you the analytics as to the number of people listening to your shows, the number of people listening to this episode versus that episode, where your listeners are in the world, and what app they are listening on, etc. There is a considerable amount of information you can use to better understand your listener base. Admittedly there's information that each of the podcast apps does not share with podcasters, and that's universally true across the whole industry. We wish that Apple, Spotify, and other platforms would share more information with podcasters than they do. Still, the information that we have is very valuable.
Example:
We have a customer from Australia that moved their podcast hosting to Podetize after publishing more than 800 episodes. They have been podcasting for a very long time and hosting it on their own website. It worked for them and their website infrastructure was able to handle the volume, at least they thought so. The reality is they didn't really know because they have no idea how many people were listening. They had no analytics.
They decided to move to Podetize for some other reason, and within days, they emailed me and we got on a Zoom call. They couldn’t believe they were getting around 3000 plays a day. We looked at the data and told them it was accurate. We waited for a few weeks, evaluated it, then waited for a few months and evaluated it again. This customer was shocked to learn they're getting about 80,000 plays of their episodes a month, a significant number that they just had no awareness of because they didn't have analytics hosting it on their own website.
Each hosting platform has an offering of additional features that can be very helpful to the podcast; so choose wisely. At Podetize, we have a proprietary SAS software that allows podcasters to upload your prerecorded intro and outro to our system once to be used across all episodes. Simply upload the unique episode file and our system can add the intro and the outro for you (with the option of a crossfade). No real editing is required. This is especially useful for those that record their episodes as a Live stream, either on Facebook, YouTube, StreamYard, or some other platform.
Have you noticed that when you go Live on Facebook, you're not always sure when you're actually live? There's this awkward silence at the beginning where you don't know if the live stream has started. As a podcast, we don't want to publish that dead air or that period at the beginning where we’re not sure if we have gone live.
With our system, you can trim the beginning or the end as much as you want to. You can take that live stream, upload the recording, listen to it, pause it, or skip it around to find the point you want it to start, and then mark that time. There’s a checkbox that indicates the time you want as the start point, and our system will put that intro on and ignore everything in the beginning ahead of that point. It’s the same thing at the end. We provide you useful automatic editing tools right on the podcast publishing platform.
Another unique thing we have at Podetize is the flexible ad insertion and swapping software in the industry. This allows you to monetize your episodes with either paid sponsored ads or calls to action or promotions for your products, services, events, courses, or whatever you might want to raise awareness for. You can add those into the episodes and change them at any time without having to edit anything. It's just a matter of uploading the new ad or ads, the new audio spots. Simply push a button and all the old episodes will be updated with the new ad files in all your episodes or any portion of your episodes that you want to.
These are some of the reasons why having a podcast host, and not just any host, is extremely important. Podetize offers state-of-the-art podcast hosting.