Stitcher is awesome. It is one of my two favorite podcast apps and if you love listening to podcasts you should be using it. If you’re a podcaster you should have your show listed on their service, and if you’re anybody at all, you really should be listening to Nothing Serious on Stitcher.
Now that the gushing and fawning is out of the way, I want to briefly discuss one of the very few problems I have with the service – Stitcher is crap at giving link love back to podcasters.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, it was this Facebook comment by Jason Calacanis that prompted me to write this post:
Stitcher is building a business on the back of content created by podcasters but doesn’t give the content creators a link to their websites or twitter accounts (something that most services do and more…). This lack of love from Stitcher feels dirty, especially to podcasters that hustle to get listeners, swap promos, promote each other, and promote services that promote them.
You might say that Stitcher is promoting your content and getting you listeners, but let’s be honest here, unless you’re a “big” podcast they’re not really. Legions of podcasters provide links to Stitcher from their websites in order to make listening easy for listeners, it’s got little to do with traffic.
Well, at least for us it’s got little to do with traffic – out of the 21,415 (at the time of writing) downloads of Nothing Serious Podcast, only 64 listens have been on Stitcher, where we are on 10 people’s playlists. I don’t think I need to do the math for you to realize how tremendously small a percentage (0.29%) of downloads that is.
Again we, Nothing Serious, are a small podcast, but I would wager that so are the vast majority of the 15,000+ podcasts that Stitcher is building its business on, and that each and every one of those podcasts would appreciate a link from the show page back to their sites so that listeners can find other means to subscribe (yes, outside of Stitchers garden) can get access to additional content and find links to join the communities that surround their favorite shows.
It’s not really much that’s being asked for. All podcast services / directories that I know of (even iTunes) provide (at least) links to the shows website, and most go much further.
So how about it Stitcher? How about you take a step toward the middle of that two-way street called the podcasting community and show us all a little love?
Paul O'Flaherty 