A month or so ago I made contact with a fellow podcaster who had posted in a Facebook forum about an issue he's been having with his podcast host.
He had suddenly been banned by Soundcloud.
No warning. No rhyme or reason.
Suddenly his podcast with over 1000 episodes, collected over the course of 10 years was gone.
He emailed the
Soundcloud "support" team to see what was the matter.
He had violated their ever-so-sacred Community Guidelines.
Apparently he had the gall to promote a product on his podcast. The desire to monetize his podcast was enough to trigger the spiderbots that crawl through their customer's data - and the humans dutifully followed orders and cancelled his show.
They won't even provide him the means to transfer his 1000+ episodes to a new podcast
host.
My associate showed me the email thread with Soundcloud, and the complete absence of empathy showed by their "support" team was quite troubling
Sadly this person did not have backups of his episodes, so he literally had 10 years of his productive life thrown down the memory hole because he completely innocently mentioned a product on his show.
I'm not exaggerating this to be dramatic. You probably hear the anger in my writing, but
this is exactly how it went down.
And even though it's not my show that was affected, it does make me angry - and terrified at how quickly some pimple-faced sophomore in New Zealand can destroy your life's work if you're too trusting of these mega corporations.
So when it comes to hosting podcasts, I always recommend two options: Captivate and Libsyn. I've never heard anything like I just described from any of these companies. They seem to respect the
fact that podcasters expect to make a buck with their shows. Captivate even has monetization links built into their podcast player.
I would never host my show on one of the major platforms like Spotify, even Apple. It's just too risky. The supposed ease of use is a trap; they won't hesitate to deplatform anyone for any reason without warning.
Not only do I recommend Captivate to my production clients, I require them to use it. It just makes
life easy when I'm using the same platform for all the shows I work on.
I've also become an affiliate of Captivate. So if you've got a podcast and are hosting it on the likes of Soundcloud, better transfer it onto something that's not going to burn you like they did my friend.
And quick.
Here's the link to signup, and transferring is super easy too!
https://jamesdnewcomb.com/capaff