I found an interesting article yesterday: “Is Your Podcast Being Held Hostage By iTunes?”
iTunes is notoriously finicky, and its team tends to take a Honey Badger approach to the concerns of indie podcast creators.
You can file this under “OH HAI, This actually happened to me.”
See, for about a month and a half, my podcast was essentially in iTunes limbo, which dropped my monthly listenership by about 60%. Sixty Percent!
In that time, I had numerous conversations with the support team who confirmed that they had fixed it, or forced the refresh, but each interaction took, at the very least 3 days between a message or action, and the actual refresh or result being in effect.
In a way I’m incredibly grateful not to be financially reliant on iTunes, because I would have lost half of my income from this revenue source otherwise.
Also thankful to have a good listenership over other sources (such as Mixcloud, Soundcloud, and most of all the dedicated microsite.)
I think this is important for a number of reasons —