Pinecast and the Fifteen Points
Reddit user /u/StargatePioneer, a host of the Better Podcasting, has fifteen-points of criteria for choosing a podcast hosting service. You can check out the Better Podcasting episode that outlines the criteria on their website. I wanted to take the time to go through each point and compare how Pinecast stacks up.
The criteria
#1 Don’t mess with my file. What I upload is what I want people to download.
Pinecast does not re-encode your file when you upload it. However, we do offer the ability to add or update meta tags (and embed podcast artwork) during the upload process. ID3 tags, which are the tags stored within the episode itself, annotate the file with basic information about your show. Embedded podcast artwork is what most apps use to show episode-specific artwork in locations like your phone’s lock screen.
This process is entirely optional and can be skipped. Not only that, all of the code that does this is open source and available on our Github profile.
#2 Give me the ability to have an unlimited back catalog (unlimited storage)
Done, Pinecast doesn’t limit the number of episodes that you can host. We do have a file size limit for audio files (80MB/episode + an extra 80MB each month to cover overages on our Starter plan), but you can split large files into multiple episodes.
#3 Don’t limit my audience size (unlimited bandwidth)
Done, Pinecast doesn’t meter bandwidth in any way.
#4 Don’t control my feed, and make it easy to leave if I choose to do so. I need to be able to put in an iTunes redirect script.
We will happily help you set up a feed redirect at any time, no questions asked. Additionally, we keep your feed redirect active even if you cancel your subscription (or are on our free plan). The redirect is permanent, so you don’t need to worry about losing subscribers after you leave. And if you decide to come back, we’ll work with you to reverse the process for a seamless transition.
#5 Give me support.
Virtually all support messages receive a response within 24 hours. The overwhelming majority receive a response within an hour.
#6 Charge me for your service so you can stay in business
Pinecast has been engineered from the get-go to be scalable. We charge you for what we’re providing to you. We don’t lean on the revenue from Pro ($50/mo) subscriptions to pay for Starter ($5/mo) accounts’ resource utilization. Pinecast hasn’t ever operated at a loss.
#7 Give me stats so I can see what’s working. It would be nice if they were accurate.
We take great pride in the quality of our analytics. Our Starter plan includes comprehensive analytics (beyond the basic listen tallies included with the free plan), including analytics for subscribers (rather than just for listens).
We also keep historical logs of every listen, so that if we discover a source of inaccuracy, we can perform a retroactive adjustment.
#8 Easy to download from a webpage
We offer two ways to download podcast episodes:
- Each embeddable player includes a link to download the episode.
- We provide you with an audio URL for each episode that you can link to.
We don’t hide your audio URL, and if you feel like we’re falling short, we’d love to hear from you.
#9 Quickly adapt to changing industry standards
(such as the new Apple Podcast tags announced at WWDC 2017)
We have always quickly added new features. We support Apple’s 2017 podcast tags, we offer JSONFeed, DNT headers, we’ve implemented many of the proposals from the (now defunct) Syndicated Media group, and more.
If there is a standard that you’re interested in that we don’t currently support, please reach out.
#10 Quickly adapt to new publishing destinations.
Pinecast has always tried to support new publishing destinations. We’ve worked hard to partner with Spotify, and we work with anyone that reaches out. Just recently, we added Listen Notes support. In 2018, we worked with RadioPublic to add Tip Jar support to their podcast funding tags.
Our feeds support every directory, and with few exceptions, we provide you with links on your dashboard to make sure your show gets listed.
#11 The provided statistics must be IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines “compliant” or better yet “certified.”
See IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines
As I mentioned, we’re very proud of the quality of analytics that we provide, ad we firmly believe that we are compliant with the IAB standard. We automatically handle:
- Filtering duplicate downloads
- Filtering out web crawlers and bots
- Understanding duplicate requests from apps like Apple Podcasts
Additionally, roughly every quarter we audit our analytics. We try to identify previously-undiscovered sources of spurious listens (bots, web crawlers) and incorrectly flagged junk listens (e.g., caused by a new podcast app with a suspicious signature) and retroactively update your analytics to be more correct.
While this process does cause fluctuations with your numbers, we send an email with the amount of change that you’ll notice. It also improves your analytics going forward with new heuristics, and reduces the “spikiness” of your charts.
#12 The company must be run with above-board ethics
and have personnel that [do not embarrass my brand] to be associated with their brand
Pinecast is a company built on trust. While it’s difficult for us to assert our own ethical standard, we try to do our best to show that we respect your patronage to our service.
- Numerous open source contributions, including expansive internal codebases and contributions to upstream vendors
- Strict confidentiality of customer concerns
- Respect for customer choice, offering no-questions-asked feed redirects and reasonable refunds
- Your content is owned by you. We do not reserve any right to use your material or brand without permission
- We respect listener privacy and observe best practices
- We take great care to ensure our services employ best practices with regard to security
#13 The files should not be masked with a separate URL.
Pinecast does use a redirect based approach. This was not how our service was originally built; we originally did link to the original audio file. This, however, turns out to be a bad approach to serving audio.
- First, over half of podcasters will re-upload an audio file in the lifetime of their show. If you re-upload an audio file and the direct URL of the MP3 is shared, anywhere that you’ve distributed that URL (a WordPress site, tweet, etc.) now needs to be updated. By using a redirect, we’re able to cut over to the new file immediately (and use a query parameter to signal to directories like Spotify to re-download the audio).
- Distributing audio and tracking analytics becomes more expensive. The URL of the file you’re distributing needs to be placed behind a CDN (content delivery network). This allows the file to be cached around the world and significantly decreases bandwidth costs (especially if you don’t run your own data centers, like Pinecast). However, tracking analytics from a CDN requires either an agreement from the provider (usually costing a significant amount of money) and puts the burden of analytics speed and reliability on yet-another-third-party, or it requires changes that reduce the speed and cost savings of using a CDN in the first place.
- Some of the heuristics that Pinecast uses to filter out duplicate listens and bots rely on much more careful tracking of network requests than a CDN would otherwise allow you to perform. By performing that work at the level of a redirect, Pinecast is able to have efficacious analytics processing while keeping costs very low. Trusted third party analytics vendors (e.g., Podtrac, Chartable, Dynamo) all use redirects to link to the audio files. Good analytics simply require the use of a redirect, unless you have the resources of a very large company.
The points that the Better Podcast hosts make are not invalid:
- If someone links to the file that’s been redirected, you won’t get analytics for those links.
- If you use a tool like PowerPress and change hosts, you’ll need to replace the URLs.
- The file should appear as you named it when you visit it in the browser.
Those are all fairly valid points.
To the first point, that’s very correct. However, it’s equally likely that someone downloaded and shared your audio file directly (in which case, there’s no record of the listen at all). We work hard to ensure that embeddable players are available and third parties can use our audio redirect URLs, so nobody should have ever loaded your audio file (and been redirected) directly in the browser in the first place.
To the second point, this fear is mostly unfounded. If you switch hosts, the <guid> of each episode should remain unchanged. This is the unique ID of the episode, and allows podcast apps and plugins like PowerPress to update things like the episode title without re-downloading the episode (or having it appear as a new episode). If you switch your show’s feed URL, the plugin should crawl each episode in the feed and update the audio URL to point to the new audio URL location.
Last, the file name does appear as you named it if you click through to the audio file. We preserve your file name in our storage system, and following the redirect or downloading the file (e.g., with right click > save as) will show it.
#14 Be reliable with as little downtime as possible.
Pinecast has indeed suffered outages in the past, but we’re proud that the downtime is often minimal (minutes). In the last year, we’ve maintained a strong “five nines” of uptime (99.999%).
Additionally, we’ve taken great care to segregate our various services. If analytics suffer downtime, feeds don’t go down (and in fact, no analytics data can be lost in an outage). If feeds go down, podcast websites don’t go down. If the dashboard goes down, feeds don’t go down.
#15 Offer variable plans so I can adjust my monthly costs to my release schedule
In the episode of Better Podcasting, the hosts state that this is intended to apply to the “average podcaster,” so I’ll talk about our service in that context.
We offer only one plan for the average podcaster: our $5/mo Starter plan. We believe that this is affordable and contains all of the features you’d need to start your podcast and run it for the your show’s lifetime. In fact, this was a very intentional decision. Pinecast was started this way because of the confusing (and in a lot of cases, manipulative) pricing structures of these so-called “variable” pricing plans. We’ve intentionally built the Starter plan to include any feature that we’d otherwise throw into an intermediate tier.
The hosts throw a bit of shade, calling out a $5/mo versus $50/mo price difference between tiers (*cough*). We offer our Pro plan not for the average podcaster, but rather for folks that run networks, companies, or other large entities that require features that have a meaningfully higher cost for us to provide. We’re looking to decrease the cost of our Pro plan in the future, but it represents the true engineering and resource costs of the underlying infrastructure associated with that plan.
In closing
We don’t tick all of the boxes, but we believe we’re a fairly fit solution for many podcasters. It’s also the case that some of the trade-offs (such as those mentioned in #13) are acceptable—or even desirable—for podcasters.
If you have questions about our service, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
