Do You Have to Use a Platform when Starting a New Podcast?
Established platforms often confine podcasters to their solutions, subjecting them to potential censorship, cancellation, or removal. In contrast, running a podcast independently grants creators greater freedom in hosting, distribution, and content, allowing them to be unrestrained in their creativity.
Balancing ease of use with creative autonomy
Podcasting as a medium has existed for quite some time, even before smartphones were prevalent. It used to be, however, difficult and expensive to create a podcast. Finally, we have several platforms that help podcasters-to-be get started. Using these platforms, you will be able to create an internet radio show from conception to publication. Moreover, you get to do all that for free – what a great deal.
Indeed, this is the most convenient way for many podcasters. Yet, some of us want to have more control over our creations. Relying fully on one of these podcasting platforms removes many of the freedoms podcasts as a media still have.
Due to the open and free nature of the web's initial setup, many modern necessities that we take for granted have proliferated and become ubiquitous.
No one controlled the early internet
Entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and just humble enthusiasts were free to create new things and push forward their ideas without asking permission. However, as the World Wide Web grew, the amount of information grew even faster; thus, it was hard to grasp. That gave birth to all sorts of aggregators, search engines being probably the most powerful among them. Consequently just having a website online was not enough. If you wanted people to be able to find you in the endless sea of all those other sites, you had to deal with search engines and worry about SEO. Not an easy thing to do. If a search engine downranks your pages, it is often synonymous with canceling it altogether. It is even more true if your project is dependent on a platform.
Proprietary platforms have censorship and restrictive policies
They can incorporate invasive user tracking techniques. They might decide to raise prices, fail to earn enough to be sustainable and just close their doors, or sell your project and all your subscribers to the highest bidder. In other words, if you do not control your podcast, it is not really yours. You just help that platform to build its business by providing your content. Yes, they do pay some expenses, they might even help you partially monetize it, yet it all can go away without prior notice.
For media like video blogging, it’s not practical to be independent of a platform like YouTube. That is because hosting videos is still not feasible for smaller players. And it was the case for audio content for a long time too, but in the mid 2010s, things started to change. Prices for hosting and bandwidth needed for audio content like podcasts became accessible like never before. That gave a tremendous rise to podcasts as a media.
To this day, podcasts are one of the most unrestricted forms of delivering ideas. This is very fortunate and even unique. Apple was at the roots of the popularization of podcasting, yet they never really tried to control it. However, the explosive growth of podcasting recently attracted many other big players. While they were much later to the party, they invested hundreds of millions of dollars in what may appear to be a land grab.
Proprietary platforms have not killed the free nature of podcasting, but if every podcaster used only those from a few big players, the picture would be very different. Therefore, if you are a proponent of the free and open web and want the podcasting media to remain free, you might not like the idea of many podcasts remaining dependent on platforms.
More benefits of staying independent
Fortunately, there are great tools that allow many small podcasters to remain independent even without technical expertise. This opens the door to access a wider audience, not be afraid of censorship, and have more options for monetization, distribution, and content management.
Also, if you are in charge of your podcast you still have an option to sign up to any or all of those platforms and reap their benefits, while not having to rely only on them. Podcast Directories are an essential instrument that allows podcasts audiences to discover what to listen and subscribe to, and most of them areopen and free. Basically directories are just that — a catalog of available podcasts, up to date index of all the podcasts that were published and submitted to this directory.
Platforms are walled gardens with tools for podcasting and usually include a small directory for the podcasts that are published within.
It is crucial to understand that while not being on a platform removes direct censorship and even approval of your content, there are still several real world limitations and you still have to abide by the laws of countries that you care about. You just will have to be your own gatekeeper and make sure that you do not get in trouble with the authorities or with some activist groups that still can put a lot of pressure on you via various means.
This was not that easy before, but today it is totally doable for everyone willing to try. So, no, you do not have to use a proprietary platform when starting a new podcast. And Indeecast is here to help you with that.