Creating a Private RSS Feed

Jordan: 0:00

There are a number of reasons to have a private RSS feed. But what is the best way to create one? I'm Jordan host a podcast and q&a, where we answer your questions about how to start, grow and monetize a podcast. This week's question is from Ryan.

Ryan: 0:17

Hi, my name is Ryan. I'm setting up a private RSS feed geared toward my Patreon followers. I'm going to start releasing bonus episodes on there. I want to know what is the easiest and most secure and safe I guess, way to create a private RSS feed and be able to share it on Patreon, because that'd be done through Buzzsprout. Is there a way to like encrypted? Is there a way to like make it so it's unique to each individual patron? Or is it just the general private feed? If it's just a general private fee that you copy and paste? That's fine, too. I just want to know what's the best possible way to generate a private rssb. Thank you very much.

Jordan: 0:52

Thanks for your question, Ryan. Joining me in this episode is the co founder of Buzzsprout. Tom Rossi. Hi, Tom, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Podcasting Q&A.

Tom: 1:04

Thanks for having me, Jordan.

Jordan: 1:05

So I wanted to bring you on for this episode, because this episode is specifically about creating a private RSS feed, and you just seem like the guy

Tom: 1:15

that's I like being the guy. Yeah, that's

Jordan: 1:18

good. That's good. RSS feed guy. One of the things that I think is important to touch on Buzzsprout was so good at making things so simple. That to me, the RSS feed is like shrouded in mystery, and I get the little short URL that you guys provide. But I don't actually know what all goes into an RSS feed. So I'm wondering if you can explain that to me, in very simple terms.

Tom: 1:46

Sure. Sure. My hope, really, with Buzzsprout was that we would get to a place where podcasters don't even know what an RSS feed is that they don't even know the term because it's just it's not something that they should have to know, unfortunately, we still do kind of have to know it, you're going to hear the term a lot as a podcaster, you're going to hear someone is going to talk about, hey, what's your feed address, what's your RSS feed, things like that. And so unfortunately, it is something that that you have to be a little bit familiar with. Basically, it's kind of like a web page. So your podcast might have a website where anybody can go to and they can look at and they can find your episodes, and they can find out about you and the podcast and the descriptions and all those kinds of things. And that's great for people. But it's not great for computers. So when a computer wants to find out information about your podcast, rather than going to your website, it goes to your RSS feed, the RSS feed has all of the information about your podcast and all of your episodes. And it's available in a format that can be used by computers. So who might do that? Well, directories, so Apple, Spotify, Amazon, any service that is pulling down your podcast, they're gonna want it in some type of computer coded availability. And that's where the RSS feed comes in.

Jordan: 2:58

Okay, and so the RSS feed contains all of our episode information. It also contains information about artwork,

Tom: 3:06

everything, it has your It has links to your audio files, it has links to your images, it has all of your descriptions that you put in, the way that works with Buzzsprout is we'll take the information that you give us and then we'll automatically format it into your RSS feed. So then that way, it's available to all of the listener apps to be able to download that information. This is really important when you think about this question too, which comes up all the time. People say well, hey, I just launched a new episode. Why doesn't it show up on Apple yet? Sorry, apple, but it's usually why doesn't it show up? Well, the only thing we have control over is we put it in your RSS feed once it's in your RSS feed. Now it's up to every other computer out there in the world that pulls that RSS feed to add that new episode into their listener app. So the only thing that podcast host really controls is that ability to publish it inside of the RSS feed. And then somebody else pulls it down. In RSS is a syndication protocol. It's literally for syndicating content, in this case, podcast episodes. And so whenever a new one is created, we add it to that syndication and now it's up to everyone else to pull it down.

Jordan: 4:10

And I can see a lot of you know, maybe newer podcasters wondering, okay, well, what's the difference between a public RSS feed and a private RSS feed?

Tom: 4:18

Yeah, it's gonna sound funny, but one is made public and one is private. That's about the extent of it. It's kind of like the difference between a public phone number and a private phone number, right? If I know your phone number, I could call your phone number. If you listed it in the phonebook. Are there phone books anymore?

Jordan: 4:36

Yes, there are I throw them away every year.

Tom: 4:39

Okay, so there are phone books. So that would be that would be a way to publish and make your phone number public, as you could put it in a directory like a phonebook. So with RSS feeds, it's very similar. You can have an RSS feed that nobody knows about. That would be a private RSS feed. Sometimes we call it obfuscation where you make it really complicated so that somebody Can't just guess what your RSS feed is. So if it's my podcast name dot RSS, well, somebody could just guess what your RSS feed address is. And so public and private, that's kind of at the top level, that's what it is. Now, some people go as far as to actually secure their RSS feed. So not only is it private, but you can't even access that RSS feed without providing some type of authentication, whether it's a token or username and password. But in order to actually access that RSS feed, you have to be authenticated. And that's a little less common, but it is another way to secure that content.

Jordan: 5:39

The types of people that would be using those private RSS feeds there's there's different applications for this or different contexts for having a private RSS feed. Whether that be maybe a company has a company podcast that they only want to have internally, so employees can access that and like listen to that podcast. I think that there's also schools and governments that do podcasts similar to that. And then there's also the people that do it for monetization purposes of having private paywalled content.

Tom: 6:12

Yeah, absolutely. Those are all great reasons why you might want to have a private RSS feed, you might want to have a podcast that you don't want to make available to the public, because it's only available to the people that are in my company that I'm working with, or the team that I'm a part of, or the school that I'm a part of. Or it could be like you said monetization. So that's where we're working with other services like Patreon and other ways to be able to monetize your subscribers and then provide them with special content through the form of a private RSS feed.

Jordan: 6:44

The listener who asked the question said, Okay, I know how to enable my private RSS feed in Patreon. But then what, I have a Patreon page, I have a Super Cast page, I use Apple subscriptions. And so with these platforms, especially with Patreon, or Super Cast, you do enable a private RSS feed. And then what happens is, whenever you upload an audio file, you can indicate what tier it goes to, for listeners on different subscription models, you can indicate if it's going to be a public audio file, or just for anyone who has paid for their subscription. What Patreon and supercast do is they actually generate a private individual RSS for each individual subscriber. And they indicate on their help page, do not share this with anybody.

Tom: 7:38

Right? Right. It's, it's kind of like sharing your phone number with someone right? Don't share it with any I'm sharing it with you don't share it with anybody else. So they create an RSS feed, which is private, it's not secure, but it's private. So that means that nobody knows about it, nobody's going to find it. And so hopefully, you're not going to go post it somewhere on your website, where now anybody could go find it and go get all that content for free.

Jordan: 8:04

So if somebody is not wanting to use a platform, like Patreon, or supercast, what is a way that they could use Buzzsprout to host a private podcast to host a private RSS feed that they're not going to share with other people? How would they go about doing that?

Tom: 8:20

Sure. So Buzzsprout, we have the ability, basically, to hide your podcast. So you can turn off all of the things that we would normally do for promoting your podcast. For example, when you sign up for an account with Buzzsprout, we give you a website, that website will be found by Google and other search engines to be able to index it. But if you tell us hey, I want to make this a private podcast, if you enable that feature, we will hide from search engines, your website address, so that way, no one can discover it. Again, it's private, you could share it with somebody, but nobody is just going to find it on their own. The same is true with your RSS feed. That's always true. As long as you don't make it publicly available. If you don't submit it to any of the directories, no one's going to find that RSS feed. So that's the way you would set it up. If I'm setting up one for my company, and I don't want anybody else to access it or but I'm not It's not like a security issue. It's just I don't really want other people accessing it, you can sign up for Buzzsprout, turn off your public website, and then just share that feed with anybody that you want to be able to share it with.

Jordan: 9:19

And Buzzsprout does have the ability to embed your podcast on to a website. So what you could do if you're wanting to monetize, but don't want to be on a platform like Patreon, supercast, etc. You could make a private web page through Squarespace or Wix or WordPress actually has a like plugin with member press and you can create a paywalled website where you embed those episodes and they auto populate. So that's another option of something that you could do.

Tom: 9:52

Yeah, the Embed tools are always available to you. So that way you can always embed it and then put that behind a paywall. Again, it's private, nobody can find it. unless they get through your paywall wherever you set that up,

Jordan: 10:03

I'm really glad that I had you on the show because you know so much more than I

Tom: 10:07

do about that. I was the guy I was the guy that's that's that made my weekend.

Jordan: 10:12

Alright, well, thank you so much, Tom.

Tom: 10:14

No problem. Thanks for having me.

Jordan: 10:16

I hope this episode of Podcasting Q&A has been helpful to you. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on a future episode, go to pod inbox.com/buzzsprout or click the link in the show notes to leave us an audio message. And as always, Keep podcasting