Publishing and Analytics

With a plan agreed, recordings made, and the important step of editing complete (Figure 2), you're ready to share your podcast with the world. We'd obviously recommend releasing your podcast under a Creative Common license, and many Linux-based podcasts choose either the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) or the Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licenses. The CC-BY-SA license is ideal if you're not concerned about people deriving monetary value from your work. Choosing either will also help with music and logo choices, because you're then free to use similarly licensed creative works within your own podcast.

Figure 2: Performing and recording a podcast live can be a lot of fun, but it doesn't necessarily result in the best quality episodes.

Using music on the intro, the outro, and segment transitions adds a professional production quality to your podcast. Although music and design work can be commissioned cheaply through platforms such as Fiverr, choosing from Creative Commons-licensed media gives you much greater control. Many Creative Commons music tracks, for instance, are provided as a pack of stems, bundling the individual tracks used to produce the final mix. This gives podcasters a lot of flexibility, letting them repeat a section of the music, remove vocal tracks, or create an entirely different mix suitable for embedding within the podcast.

The next big question is how you intend to host your podcast. A 30-minute mono podcast is usually about 30MB. A moderately successful podcast might have 10,000 listeners, and this requires around 300GB of bandwidth per episode. Self-hosting is usually good enough to start with, especially if you can grab a domain name related to your podcast, and you can either set up a dynamic CMS such as Wordpress for posting content related to each episode, or you can use a static site generator updated for each release. Another important aspect is community feedback, and it's worth offering several options, including email or web-based comments, alongside cheaper and easier-to-maintain options like an IRC presence, a Telegram group, or a Discord server. Spotify will do all this for you, but you lose control over how you might publish or aggregate your podcast later.

Of course, a podcast wouldn't be a podcast without an RSS feed. RSS remains central to how you publish your podcast and how people listen to it. An RSS file is an XML-formatted text file that podcast players parse to understand where the podcast is located and which episodes are available (see the box entitled "Podcast RSS Format"). RSS is simple enough to create manually, and you'll find plugins for Wordpress and other sites that can make the process even more painless. It is also easy to get your podcast included in Apple's Podcasters Program [2], Spotify's equivalent [3], or YouTube, although you'll need to agree and accept certain content, RSS-formatting, and encoding requirements for Apple and Spotify. You can bypass all of this using a podcast aggregating service or host, who will happily serve your podcasts, submit them for inclusion on the most popular services, and even negotiate advertising on your behalf. Aggregating services usually cost very little up front, although they will take a substantial cut from any advertising revenue.

On the subject of money, making any from a podcast is difficult and shouldn't be your principal motivation. You might, however, make enough money to help with hosting bills and with equipment. For open source and Linux-related podcasts, you might want to consider using Patreon [4], which enables listeners to make a small contribution to the running of the podcast. You can encourage this with additional content for backers, early access to episodes, or access to a podcast feed without any advertising. You can also sell merchandise (Figure 3) or sell advertising for the podcast. Selling advertising is a unique skill, but if you're up for the challenge, nothing is stopping you from getting in touch with companies you think might be interested to negotiate advertising, sponsorship, or product reviews. These are usually negotiated in advance per-quarter or per six-months, depending on a company's advertising budget, and advertisers will want to see consistent listener numbers, listening hour numbers, and a certain level of engagement with their adverts – either through affiliate links or through podcast-specific coupon codes or similar.

Figure 3: One way to help fund a podcast is through merchandise, which can often be made and dispatched on demand, with the supplier taking a certain percentage of the overall price.

Providing meaningful statistics is surprisingly difficult and quite different from the web-based metrics you might be familiar with. Many podcast players will open multiple streams for a single listener, cache podcasts offline, or never make it through a single episode. You can carefully craft analytics for unique IP addresses and megabytes downloaded, but it's usually easier to rely on the far more advanced tools provided by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, which can usually highlight the most popular sections and also help promote engagement through reviews or comments. These numbers can then be extrapolated to include self-hosted downloads. But try not to think about the numbers too much. They can be a useful metric for growth, but they naturally fluctuate throughout the year, and it is often difficult to derive meaningful data from them. Stay true to your original plan and vision, but most importantly, have fun. Everything else will look after itself.

Figure 4: The XML used within a podcast RSS feed is easy to understand, but using an XML-aware editor, such as Visual Studio Code, will help you catch any errors that might creep in.

The Author

Graham Morrison is a distinguished Linux author and editor. He writes the FOSSPicks column for Linux Magazine and has been podcasting nearly every two weeks (and now every week) for 14 years, first on TuxRadar, which he edited, produced, and published, and more recently on Late Night Linux.