Introducing Episodes.fm

Nathan Gathright

Nathan Gathright

— 2 min read
Introducing Episodes.fm

I launched Podlink in 2018 to make sharing links to the podcasts you love easier. I sold it at the end of 2020, and Spotify laid me off in 2023, but I still wanted to iterate on that mission.

Today, I’m excited to announce an early preview of Episodes.fm. The complete feature set is still in progress, but I’d like to share some of my goals to involve other parties in the podcasting ecosystem.

Sorting by Popularity (powered by OP3)

If the majority of a podcast’s audience uses a particular app, we think new listeners to that show should be encouraged in that direction. The default sort order on Episodes.fm is determined by a combination of global market share, the listener’s device, and, if available, the podcast’s own public analytics from OP3. We don’t hide apps based on user-agent because the typical listener should only encounter this list once, which leads me to the following:

Saving preferred podcast apps with cookies

When a listener taps a podcast app, we set a cookie to remember that preference. After that, every visit to Episodes.fm will automatically redirect straight to their preferred podcast app. Unlike other services that redirect visitors straight to their device’s first-party podcast app, this approach trusts listeners to select one for themselves.

Live episodes

Podcasts that support the <podcast:liveItem> tag haven’t been able to take advantage of services like Podlink to promote their live episodes, but Episodes.fm is aiming to fill that gap. For live episodes, we show an abbreviated list of app links and let visitors listen live right from the page.

The original Podlink supported 8 apps; Episodes.fm is starting with 30 and will add more soon. If you’d like your podcast app included, submit a pull request to this repo.

Verifying additional apps

That said, we believe that podcasters shouldn’t have to claim their show on services like Episodes.fm just to add additional links to their page. We will advocate for hosts to support the <podcast:follow> tag proposal. This would allow podcasters to declare additional show-level links in their feeds, which Episodes.fm will ingest automatically.

Whenever possible, we link directly to the episode on each platform and fall back to the show-level link otherwise. The podcast namespace adopted the <podcast:contentLink> tag to provide additional episode-level links in the feed for live episodes, and we’re proposing that it should be extended to all episodes. If a podcaster provides episode links to platforms like Patreon on YouTube, Episodes.fm will ingest automatically.

And much more

It‘s early days yet for Episodes.fm. We’ve got a lot more in store and would love to hear any feature requests. Please reach out:

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