RSS.com changelog rss.com

New Feature

🎓 Learning Center, Free for Every Podcaster

We have been writing our blog since our launch in 2018, long before commercial AI tools: real people writing real content, with over 300 articles so far. Alongside it, we have made over 400 original videos for our YouTube channel and built a help center around the questions podcasters ask most.

Our brand-new Learning Center turns all of these original resources into free podcasting courses. The RSS.com Academy has six stages, 22 courses and 120 lessons, each ending with a short quiz.

Start wherever you like: at the very beginning if you are new to podcasting, or wherever your show is today. You can also search across all of it at once. Every stage you complete comes with a certificate to share on LinkedIn and other social media. Collect all six!

The RSS.com Academy is open to every podcaster, whether they host with us or not, so it is also a great resource to share with a friend who is thinking of starting a show.

New Feature

🎉 Celebrate Your Podcast Milestones

Every milestone is a reason to celebrate, and a reason to tell your listeners. When your show reaches a milestone in downloads, published episodes, PAID earnings or years since your first episode, your Dashboard now lets you know. Click Share milestone and our milestone card maker opens a card for social media with your show and the number already filled in. The celebrations start with the next milestone you reach.

New Feature

🎬 Your Embedded Player Now Plays Video

If you publish video episodes, visitors to your website or blog can now watch them right where you embed them, just as listeners watch them on Apple Podcasts. One player handles both formats, so a show that mixes audio and video plays each episode the way it was published.

To get it, copy the embed code again from your Dashboard or from your episode's page on RSS.com. Episode and show embeds play video, while the Latest Episode embed remains audio-only. Codes you copied before keep working as they are, in audio.

Improvement

✨ A Few More Improvements

• 📈 Even more from your analytics. In your Dashboard, Analytics > Episodes now opens with your Most Downloaded Episode of the last 30 days. Not your all-time top episode, but the one listeners are choosing right now, and it may well be an older one. That is the episode to share again, clip for social media, or point new listeners to first.
• 🖼️ Cover art, checked before you save. When you upload a cover, Fix it for me can now make it square and the right size for Apple Podcasts and other directories.
• ⏱️ Share the best part. Share on an episode page now has a Start at option. Pick a time and the link, or the embed code, starts playing from there.
• 🆕 A more natural order on your website. For episodic shows, your podcast website now lists episodes newest first by publication date, the order Apple Podcasts and Spotify use. Serial shows keep their order, and so do your Dashboard and your RSS feed.
• 🎙️ Download your voicemails. Every voice message listeners send to your show now has a download icon next to the play button in your Dashboard. The file is named after your show, the sender and the date. Play the best ones on your next episode or on your website, or keep the one that made your day for a bad Monday.
• ♿ Easier with a keyboard and a screen reader. Accessibility matters to us, so we improved our embedded player and our Dashboard for people who use a keyboard or a screen reader. In the player, Space plays and pauses, the left arrow goes back 15 seconds and the right arrow forward 30, and screen readers announce every button and slider with a clear name, so more of your listeners can enjoy your show. In the Dashboard, the Categories field when you create a podcast and the Power-Ups switches now work the same way.

New Feature

🎙️ Hear From Your Listeners, in Their Own Voice

Voicemail is back, and for once you will want to listen to it. Your listeners can now send you a voicemail. Ask a question of the week and play the best answers on your next episode. Run a trivia round. Collect reactions, listener stories, or feedback on a new segment. The sky is the limit. Your imagination sets the format.

Switch it on and a short invite with a link goes into every episode's notes, at the top or the bottom. Listeners tap it from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts or any app that shows episode notes, or press the Voicemail button on your episode page, and record up to 60 seconds in the browser.

The link is a plain URL, rss.com/podcasts/your-show/voicemail, so it goes anywhere you want it: a social post, your newsletter, your email signature, a QR code.

We email you every time a message arrives. You listen in your Dashboard under Settings > Voicemail, where you can also rewrite the invite in your own words.

Improvement

🔗 Web Downloads and Web Referrers in Analytics

Most plays come from apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but some listeners press play on the web: on your RSS.com podcast website, in the player embedded on other sites, or from a link shared on LinkedIn or X. Two new sections in Analytics > Overview make that share visible.

Web Downloads shows how much of your listening happens on the web. Web Referrers lists the websites those plays came from, so you can discover who embedded or linked to your show: a blog, a newsletter, a partner site, a social network.

Improvement

⏳ A Brand New Metric: Episode Age at Download

Analytics > Episodes now opens with a brand new metric, Episode Age at Download.

When you publish, listeners get a notification and many press play within days. Everything after that is your back catalog, and every show has its own: some get almost nothing from older episodes, some live on them. This chart tells you which one you are. It groups your last 30 days of downloads by how old the episode was on the day it was downloaded: 0 to 7 days, 8 to 30, 31 to 90, 90+. Most charts show when downloads happened. This one shows how old the episodes were when they were downloaded.

If half of your downloads come from episodes older than 90 days, your show lives on its own and does not depend on the next episode landing. A daily news show will see the opposite, and that is just as right for its format. True crime, history and storytelling usually spread over months, because new listeners binge from episode 1.

An active back catalog keeps earning (ads are inserted at download time) and strengthens a sponsorship pitch with downloads beyond the first 30 days.

Improvement

🌐 A New Look and Better SEO for Your Podcast Website

Your podcast website and episode pages have a new, lighter design, and so does the rest of RSS.com.

Those pages are also easier for search engines to read. Your full episode notes are now part of the page, titles and descriptions follow a clearer format, and each episode carries structured data that helps search engines understand it.

Improvement

🔢 Episode Numbers for Bonus Episodes

If you number your bonus episodes, you can now add that number when you publish them, the same way you do for full episodes. The number travels in your feed like any other, so apps that display episode numbers show it for your bonus episodes too.

Improvement

⬆️ More Reliable Uploads for Big Files

Video episodes and long recordings make for big files, and big files are the first to break on a weak connection. Anything over 100 MB now uploads in smaller parts instead of one long transfer, so big uploads are much more reliable on slow or unstable connections. Cruise wifi off the coast of Alaska, in-flight wifi on the way to Hawaii, the café with one bar of signal: your episode still gets there.

Service Update

🎬 HLS Video Podcasting, Now With Money Attached

It is official. RSS.com Video Podcasting is out of early access, and it pays.

Publish a video episode and it plays in full video on Apple Podcasts, where listeners can switch seamlessly between audio and video. Ads run automatically on your video episodes from the very first one you publish, and you keep 70% of the revenue. Activate PAID (it takes a few minutes: accept the terms, add your PayPal) and you start receiving your share from that point forward. No download threshold. No follower threshold. No waiting.

Upgrade to our new Max plan for unlimited video and audio podcasts. Available now.

When you publish a video episode, the same upload goes to YouTube, with no second file to send. The video also travels in your RSS feed as an alternate enclosure, so it plays in Podcasting 2.0 apps that support it, like Pocket Casts, TrueFans, and Podcast Guru, and on your podcast web pages. Your video ads travel with it, so you can earn ad revenue when your video is watched on supported Podcasting 2.0 apps too. Everywhere else, the episode continues to play as audio exactly as it does today.

The same week that we launched video with ads, YouTube announced that it is roughly doubling the requirements for its Partner Program: new applicants will need 8,000 qualified watch hours in the past year, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the past 90 days. Until creators qualify, ads can still appear on their videos, but they do not receive a share of that revenue. So RSS.com's HLS video offering is a new revenue channel for podcasters who want video, and an open door for YouTube creators whose format already works as a podcast, with no entry threshold to start earning.

Updated November 8, 2026. A video episode goes to YouTube when you click its YouTube button, not when you publish it. YouTube's own Partner Program page still asks for 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 watch hours in 12 months, or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days. The higher figures above came from third-party reports about changes from February 2027. YouTube has announced new terms from that date but has not published those figures.

New Feature

🏠 My Podcast, Your New Home Base

The My Podcast tab has been rebuilt as the place you land to check in on your show. It shows how far along you are, what to do next, where your monetization stands, and the resources worth reading. It is also where new notifications and nudges will appear from here on.

Episodes moved to their own tab, so managing episodes and checking on your show are now two separate jobs.

Improvement

🧭 Guided Setup for Your First Show

A step-by-step path from signup to your first listeners, built right into the My Podcast tab. Five steps: create your account, create your show, publish your first episode, distribute to the directories, and share it with your first listeners.

Steps tick off as you go, so you always know what comes next. New accounts see it on their first show, and it steps aside once you finish or once you are on a plan.

Service Update

🎬 Video Podcasting (Early Access)

Spoiler alert! Native video podcasting is officially here, in early access.

Upload a video episode and your show plays in full video on Apple Podcasts (via Apple's new HLS delivery) and in supporting Podcasting 2.0 apps (via alternate enclosure), while your audio feed keeps working everywhere else, exactly as it does today.

Want to see it in action? Greg Wasserman, our Head of Relationships, already publishes his own podcast in video. Video episodes are also displayed on your podcast web pages.

We will release a new plan supporting video soon. In the meantime we are onboarding shows gradually, so spots are limited: want in early? Join the early access waitlist and we will be in touch.

Improvement

⚡️ Faster Public Pages

Our engineers rebuilt all public-facing pages from scratch (podcast websites, episode pages, and players). The typical work nobody sees but everybody feels: same look, much faster load times, and a foundation that lets us ship improvements more quickly.

Improvement

📐 Simpler Cover Art Upload

Some podcasters, especially those just starting out, can struggle to prepare a perfect cover art that fits the technical requirements of Apple and other podcast directories, so it sometimes happens that a cover art looks square but is not perfectly square. We improved our cover art upload to automatically crop it to a perfect square and resize it to look sharp everywhere your podcast appears.

Improvement

💰 PAID Earnings in Payout Emails

For our podcasters who use PAID, our programmatic ads solution, and wait every month to see how much they made, we have now added the total amount you earned to the monthly payout notification we send out via email, so you can keep an eye on your earnings without even opening the dashboard.

New Feature

🔭 All-Time Analytics

You can now select "All time" as your analytics date range. We have removed all data-retention limits, so you can see and export your full podcast history from day one onwards. Yes, even the data from back when you had three listeners and they were all family 😉

New Feature

📝 Automatic Transcripts

You can now head to Settings → Automatic AI Transcripts in your Dashboard and activate auto-generated transcripts for every new episode. You can also auto-approve and add them to your RSS feed automatically to speed up your workflow.

New Feature

🔢 Episode Number Tip

A much-requested feature. It often happens, especially with seasoned podcasters who have many episodes published, that you are uploading a new episode and can't immediately remember which number to use. When creating a new episode, we now show the last published episode number as a reference. No more "wait, was that 73 or 74?" moments.

Improvement

🧹 Transcript Formats: VTT Only

The Podcasting 2.0 specification is deprecating SRT and TXT formats for podcast transcripts, so we did the same. VTT is meaningfully better than SRT for podcasts: support for real-time sync, interactive rendering, cue settings, non-displayed metadata, and more. Going forward, we only auto-generate and accept manual uploads in VTT. Old transcripts you previously uploaded in TXT or generated in SRT will remain in place; the change only applies to new ones.

New Feature

💎 Ad-Free Episodes for Apple Podcasts Subscribers

If you are using PAID to monetize your show with programmatic ads, you now have another way to generate revenue: deliver ad-free episodes exclusively to your Apple Podcasts subscribers, all managed directly from your RSS.com Dashboard under Monetization → Apple Podcasts Subscriptions.

Apple Podcasts is installed on over 2 billion active Apple devices. Subscribing takes one tap, payment is handled entirely by Apple, and the premium experience starts immediately with no friction. You publish one episode on RSS.com, PAID inserts ads for your public listeners, and Apple subscribers automatically get the ad-free version. You earn from both audiences at the same time, with no extra work.

One episode. Two revenue streams.

Updated November 8, 2026. You make an episode ad-free when you edit it, by choosing Ad-free under Apple Podcasts Subscriptions.

New Feature

🤖 AI disclosure

AI is already part of how podcasts are made, from editing and transcription to writing episode notes, and in some cases even recording entire episodes. The question is not whether podcasters use it, but whether listeners can tell.

We added a simple checkbox at the episode level that lets you disclose AI-generated content. The disclosure appears as a label on your podcast website and is embedded in your RSS feed, making it readable by any app or directory.

With regulators and listeners increasingly demanding transparency, disclosing now keeps your podcast ahead of the curve.

Not sure when to check the box? Visit shouldidisclose.ai to help you decide.

Improvement

📱 PodLP Distribution

We have added PodLP to the Distribution section in our Dashboard and as a Listen On button on your podcast website. PodLP is a podcast listening app with 10M+ installs built specifically for feature phones, the basic, low-cost mobile devices that are still the primary way millions of people in developing regions access the internet. Your show is now discoverable and accessible to new audiences that most podcast platforms never reach.

New Feature

🔍 Episode Search in Dashboard

One of the most requested features by our podcasters with large back catalogs is finally here! Say goodbye to endless scrolling to find that one episode from three years ago. You can now search your entire episode archive instantly, right from the dashboard. Find what you need in just a few keystrokes.

New Feature

📢 Advertise Your Brand on RSS.com Podcasts

With 50M+ monthly impressions from our in-house inventory and growing, plus access to a large partner network that can scale campaigns to hundreds of millions of impressions, you can now promote your brand and services with custom, targeted podcast ad campaigns that reach a global audience.

Send us your budget and goals, and our team will propose a state-of-the-art campaign with real-time targeting by location and demographics, plus targeting by podcast category and topic. You also get IAB certified reporting.

Whether you are advertising your local restaurant, your startup, or a global brand, we have a solution for you.

Learn more here: https://rss.com/mediakit

New Feature

📼 Added Support for Alternate Enclosure

We love innovation in podcasting, especially the kind that makes our medium more open and accessible. We adopted Podcasting 2.0 features like Transcripts and Chapters early on, and later they became mainstream with support from Apple. We hope Alternate Enclosure is on a similar path. We have added support for the Alternate Enclosure under Settings → Power Ups.

This allows you to attach alternative media files to the same episode using externally hosted URLs. For instance, you can provide lightweight audio files alongside your standard MP3. Supporting apps such as PodLP, a popular podcast app for feature phones with 10M+ installs, can automatically choose the lowest bitrate audio format, improving playback on slower networks and devices with limited resources.

You can also attach other formats, including HLS video streams, as an alternative to the primary audio file. While major platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not support Alternate Enclosure yet, it is already implemented in a number of independent apps and we expect broader adoption to follow over time.

Improvement

🤖 API Updates

Since launching our public API last December, we have been steadily improving it behind the scenes. Today, we have updated several endpoints to a new version for better performance and reliability.

Also, we are seeing great momentum: more podcasters are using our API to automate their workflows, and more third-party tools are integrating with RSS.com, from Zapier to apps that enable one-click episode publishing.

Improvement

🍏 Apple Subscriptions: Short-Term Early Access Now Available

Apple Podcasts Subscriptions is a low-effort way to monetize your podcast with enormous reach: iPhone alone represents roughly one quarter of the global active smartphone base, and subscribing is native with a single tap inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Until now, Apple Early Access Episodes on RSS.com were geared toward longer windows (1 to 4 weeks). We have now added short-term Early Access options of 3 or 5 days, which are perfect for weekly shows and time-sensitive releases where a full week (or more) feels too long.

We are also working on a new subscription model. Stay tuned 🙂

Improvement

📆 Improved Analytics Date Selector

See the bigger picture. You can now select custom date ranges of up to 365 days in your Analytics dashboard, making it easier to track long-term trends, measure growth, and compare performance over time.

New Feature

⬇️ Episode Sorting Controls

Our podcasters asked for better ways to sort their episodes, especially when managing a large back catalog. You can now sort episodes in your Dashboard by newest or oldest, making it easier to get to older episodes.

New Feature

📊 Custom Date Range Selection in Analytics

Analytics now supports custom date ranges. Whether you want to review last week or skip Mondays entirely and only look at Tuesday to Friday, you can pick exact dates and generate the report you need.

Improvement

🍿 Do Even More With YouTube

We improved our audio-to-video YouTube publishing feature in the Distribution tab, both for performance and user experience. It is now simpler to connect your channel and sync your playlist.

Improvement

🗑️ You Can (Finally) Delete Episode Art

You can now delete episode art. Previously, you could upload new episode art and replace the existing one, but you could not remove it entirely, which made “no episode art at all” a surprisingly hard request. Welcome to the long overdue Delete button.

New Feature

🤖 RSS.com public API: Now Live

Our API has officially landed. If you are not familiar with what an API does: it means you can now create podcasts and manage episodes from third-party tools, automations, or your own code, without having to use the RSS.com web dashboard.

This opens a new era of workflows, automations, and integrations with the apps you already use.

For the techies among us, but also for vibe coders who like experimenting with AI, you can now build all sorts of automations, like publishing a new episode of your show:

🚪 when your doorbell rings and nobody is home

📦 when your package is marked "delivered" but you cannot find it anywhere

🌙 when your smart lights switch to "it is definitely too late" mode

🧺 when your washing machine finishes and you ignore it for three hours

⌚️ when your smartwatch says "time to stand" and you absolutely do not

🛫 when your phone pops up a boarding pass notification and it is officially holiday mode

Yes, all of this is technically possible starting today!

Seriously though: with the RSS.com API you can automate workflows, manage episodes, speed up publishing pipelines, and build custom tooling around your show or network, all powered by secure, first-party API access.

Available to podcasters on our Podcast Networks plan: open the Account menu in the top-right of your dashboard, then select API Access to generate your API keys.

Docs: https://api.rss.com/v4/docs

Also, you can create multiple API keys to keep things clean and secure across different services, apps, and automations.

This is just the beginning. More integrations and workflow goodies are coming soon 🚀

Improvement

Smarter auto mid-roll ads (and another great reason to use chapters)

For users on PAID, our programmatic ads solution with the lowest entry threshold out there, auto mid-roll ads just got smarter.

They are now chapter-aware, which means we can place mid-rolls more intelligently using your chapter markers whenever the placement conditions are met.

Technically speaking: we upgraded the mid-roll placement algorithm to make better timing decisions when chapters are present.

Practically speaking: this is yet another reason to add chapters to your episodes. You get better-timed mid-rolls that fit the flow of the episode, and the chapters you create in RSS.com now show up across most listener apps and directories globally. Spoiler alert: Apple Podcasts support for chapters is coming this month!

Improvement

🔭 Longer Lookback for Analytics

If you are on a Podcast Networks plan, your analytics just got a big upgrade. You can now view up to a full year of data. This makes it easier to spot trends, compare episodes over time, and do deeper performance reviews for all your shows.

Improvement

🧭 New Navigation

If you manage podcasts from your phone, this one is for you. We redesigned the main navigation so the podcast switcher now lives alongside your account actions in the top bar.

The result: more usable screen space, fewer taps, and a cleaner experience on mobile and every other device size too.

Improvement

🎥 Faster YouTube Publishing and a New "Listen On YouTube" Button

We rebuilt our Audio-to-YouTube service from the ground up, and the results are clear. Converting your audio episodes into videos is now up to 4× faster than before, so your episodes reach YouTube in record time.

We also refreshed the public podcast and episode pages. If your show is published on YouTube through our Audio-to-YouTube Conversion feature, you will now see a new Listen on YouTube button directly in the Listen On section of your podcast website.