Anyone can submit podcasts to our platform through one of the following:
- Search bar in the apps
- Pocket Casts Submission Form
The following types of links are accepted:
- Podcast RSS feed URL
- Apple Podcasts link
There are many reasons why podcast submission might be unsuccessful, but you can follow these steps to start working towards a solution:
- Check if the type of link you’re submitting is accepted by our platform. It has to be either a podcast RSS feed URL or an Apple Podcasts link.
- Check if the podcast feed is valid. You can use the following:
- Pocket Casts Submission Form – if podcast submission through our form fails, it will normally show a specific error message
- W3C Feed Validation Service
- podbase Podcast Validator
- If the feed is invalid and you’re a listener, please reach out directly to the podcast creator with the validation errors highlighted in step 2 to help them resolve the issues.
- If a feed is showing up as valid, but you’re still having trouble submitting it to Pocket Casts, please get in touch with us.
After a podcast is submitted to Pocket Casts, it can take a little while before it appears in search. So, please don’t panic if it’s not immediately showing up!
It’s also possible that the RSS feed of the podcast you submitted contains the <itunes:block>Yes<itunes:block> iTunes block. In this case, our platform classifies the podcast as “private,” so it will not show up in our public search database by default. You can, however, still share the podcast.
If the podcast is not meant to be private and you want it to show up in search results, please reach out to us.
When a podcast appears in search results even though it is meant to be private, it’s most likely because the feed doesn’t contain the <itunes:block>Yes<itunes:block> XML tag. Podcast creators should use this tag to automatically mark a feed as private on our platform and others.
If a feed is appearing in search when it should be private, ask the podcast author to check if the feed contains the <itunes:block>Yes<itunes:block> tag. If the tag is only added after the feed is submitted to Pocket Casts, our system won’t immediately hide the podcast from our public search database, but it will eventually do so automatically.
There are podcasts that have both free and members-only/paid versions of their feeds. The members-only feeds often are private and contain bonus content.
If you submit a members-only feed to Pocket Casts, you sometimes might find that you’re not getting additional episodes. This usually happens because of a safety check we have in place against duplicate listings, which looks at the following feed information:
- Title
- Author
- Website URL
- Thumbnail URL
If the above information is the same for both the free and the members-only feeds, the latter will be classified as a duplicate listing.
To remedy this, please ask the podcast author to add the following XML tag to your private feed:
<itunes:block>Yes<itunes:block>
The above tag will prevent our system from trying to match the feed with any others.
Please refer to the following support article: Private and paid podcast feeds.
If you added a podcast through the submission form and the submission was successful, you should see the Pocket Casts share link at the bottom of the page.
If you added a podcast through the search bar in the apps, you can follow the steps in the following support article to obtain the share link: Sharing Podcasts and Episodes.
If you need more help with submitting a podcast to Pocket Casts, please feel free to contact us!
