The Strategic Benefits of Unified Podcast Feeds
By Esther Kezia Thorpe, freelance media analyst and co-founder at Media Voices.
Building an audience for podcasts can be a long process. So when publishers decide to launch a new show, is it better to create a new RSS feed for it and begin the effort of building up an audience from scratch again, or mix shows into one feed?
Podcasts are becoming increasingly important sources of revenue and audience engagement, and how they are distributed can make the difference in the success or failure of a show. While there are some pitfalls to consolidation, overall, the results are more favorable.
At the Publisher Podcast Summit earlier this year, two publishers shared their experiences of working with separate and combined feeds.
Tortoise’s hybrid approach
Tortoise is a UK-based audio-first newsroom focused on slow news rather than breaking news.
The Slow Newscast was their first flagship show, with weekly investigation-style episodes. A series about catfishing was launched with its own feed. Sweet Bobby has since become a viral sensation—downloaded tens of millions of times—and was released as a Netflix series.
After the success of Sweet Bobby, the Tortoise team decided to explore more investigative series, publishing six to eight part episodes on individual feeds. They ended up with around ten of these, all doing moderately well. “What we found was, as there are more and more podcasts out there, it was harder to cut through, and we were not seeing the same kind of huge numbers that we had at the beginning,” commercial strategy director Alice Sandelson said at The Publisher Podcast Summit.
In 2023, they created Tortoise Investigates, a single feed in which all investigative series are hosted.
That strategy gives them the opportunity to “hero” the new series in the feed. “We then create individual feeds for those series after the fact, so that they are still searchable and SEO works,” Sandelson said.
After the success of the Tortoise Investigates feed, they decided to launch a master consolidated feed for their conversational news shows. “With limited marketing budgets, we can direct people to, if you want to hear Tortoise’s news content, you go to Tortoise News,” Sandelson said. “That feed has three or four shows and bonus content publishing each week.”
New Statesman: One feed to rule them all
UK political publisher the New Statesman has been running a podcast since 2013 and in 2021, they identified podcasts as a growth area, giving it investment to launch new shows and an in-house audio team. They launched The World Review podcast in its own feed. In 2022, they added Audio Long Reads, in which each episode is a narrated version of an article.
“We were running those [podcasts] as separate feeds,” executive producer of audio and video Chris Stone said at The Publisher Podcast Summit. “We were getting an audience for all three of those feeds, and although we were spending the same amount of effort on each one, the ‘main feed’ as we call it was getting about 80% of our downloads.”
The contrast with the more established New Statesman Podcast feed struck him as an opportunity. “You’ve got this other feed that’s getting loads of downloads and an established audience. We thought, ‘Well, can we bring those other strands into that single feed, and will that give us more bang for our buck?’”
Last year, Stone began consolidating the three podcasts into one feed.
“Overall, our feed downloads [on the main feed] went up, but they didn’t go up by three times. On average, the episode downloads were lower, but the total feed downloads were higher. So it may be double the downloads of the [separate] feed; still significantly better.”
For the New Statesman, which monetizes podcasts primarily through dynamic ad insertions and sponsorships, doubling the listener numbers on those episodes has had a measurable commercial impact.
The pros of consolidation
Discoverability
For both Tortoise and the New Statesman, discoverability was a key driver of consolidation, and both Sandelson and Stone said that this has helped them overcome some of the difficulties of launching and discovering new shows.
“When [a new show is] six episodes, if you focus all of your marketing on launch, you see a real peak but then it does fall away,” Sandelson said. “When we were first doing these series, you might get a week of front page promotion on Apple, and you could really see growth. Now, you’re getting one or two days before it’s moving on.”
Some publishers try cross-promoting samples of episodes or trailers in more established feeds to attract listeners to new ones. “That does work, but the simplicity of the marketing message and also in listeners’ minds of, if you like Tortoise Investigations, you just need to follow this feed, and every month or two months you will get a new investigation. It makes cutting through a lot easier,” Sandelson said.
The relatively small size of the New Statesman’s teams meant the extra boost from a combined podcast feed is welcome. “We don’t have the means to promote multiple podcast properties,” he said. “We already had a very identifiable brand, that was very clearly the New Statesman Podcast. If someone searches for the New Statesman, that’s what comes up rather than World Review or Audio Long Reads.”
Both publishers agreed that it’s easier for audiences to find and follow one feed than many, especially if the shows have a strong connection with a publication.
Revenue
While audience growth was a primary driver for both publishers, Sandelson said that there was also a commercial imperative to be considered. “That spike you get from six-part series on their own feeds doesn’t play into what brands are looking for, which is habitual listening,” she said.
Having Tortoise Investigates on one feed means that downloads are “consistently higher than they ever were, which means that we are seeing much more significant ad revenue and sponsorship revenue come through.”
Consolidated feeds are delivering significantly more revenue per download than the individual feeds are. “It’s a numbers game, and the more you can get those numbers up, the more appealing it becomes,” Sandelson said. “Consolidated feeds are a way to do that, and also to make sure you’re not peaking and troughing constantly.”
Sandelson said that they have ‘box sets’ of investigations available to binge listen for paying subscribers. “On the day that the first episode is released, you can listen to all six episodes if you pay. If not, they’re dropped every week or depending on the particular cadence of that series. That’s incredibly helpful for us, because we get our full audience and marketing power behind that, and then we see much higher conversion.”
Still, Tortoise is struggling with churn as people binge listen to a series in a few days then cancel. “What we’re really trying to do is, at the end of those last episodes, encourage people to stay by saying, ‘There’s more content here, and you can go to other feeds, or you can wait a few weeks and get the next series’,” Sandelson said. “But subscription absolutely is more powerful as a result of that one feed.”
The cons of consolidation
Listener numbers and expectations
As Stone found out with the New Statesman, combining feeds doesn’t mean all the individual feed listens will be added to the main one, or that all episodes will increase in listens. Sandelson said that this was partly to do with the way that platforms promote content. “For example, with Apple’s Listen Now tab, if you’re putting 10 episodes in a day, then episodes 1-9 aren’t being promoted,” she explained.
Tortoise is currently testing to see if fewer episodes in the feed promotes more growth. “We were publishing twice a day when we launched, which was a lot, and we have now reduced it to once a day, but we still do bonus episodes and on Friday we always have two,” she said. They can see a notable effect; for example, on bank holidays when no episode is published, the most recently released episode gets more downloads than typical.
When they first consolidated the feeds, New Statesman audiences felt overwhelmed with too much content. “We’ve reduced it, and in a normal operating week, we’re now doing three episodes a week plus the occasional partnered episode with commercial partners, and that seems about right at the moment,” Stone said.
Distinguishing shows
Another challenge of a single feed is distinguishing shows within that feed. The New Statesman publishes multiple episodes a week on slightly different themes, but it has pushed the team to ensure that each one fits the New Statesman audience. Shows have their own artworks on each episode, but titles are kept free from any distinguishing tags to hook audiences with intriguing questions.
Tortoise similarly uses separate artwork for each episode to build each show’s brand, as well as using the titles to clearly separate series. For a time after launch, Tortoise will also change the main feed’s artwork to that of the new show. Sandelson pointed out that the shows themselves have distinct identities and different voices, “so it’s clear within the first 10 seconds why you’re listening and what you’re listening to.”
Ultimately, the success of a podcast feed comes down to good content. “Meeting your audience where they are is a hugely valuable audience growth and commercial tool, but that’s not going to work if you’re mixing content that people don’t want,” Sandelson said.
