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The PodcastGuests.com Founder has a warning for all podcasters. Last Monday he received a notice from Apple Podcasts with the subject “Apple Podcasts Rejection.” Apple removed his podcast from its system due to “technical problems with the feed”. That’s all the message said and iTunes Connect didn’t provide any more information.
Here Allemann details what happened and what you need to be aware of…
“This was a bad way to start off the week. Getting kicked out of Apple Podcasts means not only missing out on iPhone listeners but also potentially others that pull from the Apple Podcasts list. With little information to go on, I started checking out everything about my podcast’s feed. Cast Feed Validator said my feed size was too big but this seemed like an odd thing for Apple to kick the podcast out for.
As it turns out, however, that was just it: my feed size was so large that it was timing out. The safe guideline is to keep your feed under 512kb. It’s natural to want to include everything in your RSS feed but clearly, that’s not OK. I use the Blubrry PowerPress plugin for my feed. If you use this plugin, go to the feed tab and check the box “Maximize the number of episodes while maintaining an optimal feed size " to make sure your feed doesn’t get too big.
Unfortunately, if Apple Podcasts kicks your podcast out for technical reasons you’ll have to resubmit it. It took until the end of the week for my listing to be reinstated. If you have your own podcast, I recommend keeping an eye on your feed size and making sure your settings are appropriate.
Learn from my mistake.”
Andrew Allemann is the founder of PodcastGuests.com. He can be reached at Andrew@podcastguests.com
Comments:
An important additional clarification to this is it’s really not about the size of the feed, but its performance. You can have a 100 KB feed hosted on a bad server take too long to load and timeout. You can also have a 5 MB feed hosted on a fast server (or mirrored for performance with something like Blubrry’s free PodcastMirror.com) and it load quickly and thus never timeout. There are big feeds in Apple Podcasts; some of them have thousands of episodes!