While working on my last two posts on how often big shows publish and how long their episodes run, I had to look at thousands of RSS feeds. I started noticing some patterns in the URLs and got curious.
So, I decided to do a much more formal analysis to figure out this question: who are the hosting providers for all these top shows?
The results were pretty surprising. In this post, I'll show you:
- The hosting data for the top 1,000 and top 10,000 shows.
- The key patterns that stood out to me.
- The methodology I used, which got interesting because I found some quirks in how these feeds are structured.
Results
Feed hosts — Top 1,000 shows
Market share of feed hosting providers for the 1,000 highest-audience shows.
| Host | Shows | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Megaphone | 289 | 28.9% |
| Omny | 127 | 12.7% |
| ART19 | 109 | 10.9% |
| First-Party RSS | 95 | 9.5% |
| Simplecast | 92 | 9.2% |
| Libsyn | 77 | 7.7% |
| Everything else | 211 | 21.1% |
| Total | 1,000 | 100% |
Feed hosts — Top 10,000 shows
Market share of feed hosting providers for the 10,000 highest-audience shows.
| Host | Shows | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Megaphone | 2,027 | 20.3% |
| Libsyn | 1,454 | 14.5% |
| Simplecast | 720 | 7.2% |
| Omny | 702 | 7.0% |
| Acast | 695 | 7.0% |
| Spotify / Anchor | 585 | 5.8% |
| First-Party RSS | 544 | 5.4% |
| Everything else | 3,273 | 32.7% |
| Total | 10,000 | 100% |
My Key Takeaways
-
The Great Podcast Graduation. If you look at the top 10,000 shows, the indie platforms are the heroes. For example, Libsyn is a giant (14.5%!). But something fascinating happens when you zoom in on just the elite top 1,000 shows—the indie share gets cut in half (Libsyn drops to 7.7%). It seems that as shows become commercial powerhouses, they 'graduate' to an enterprise stack.
-
The Rise of the Enterprise Hosts. So, where do all those graduating shows go? To be honest, before I did this analysis, I wasn't even aware of names like Omny Studio and ART19. I was expecting to see the names we all hear about—Libsyn, Buzzsprout, Transistor. But the data shows that as podcasts scale, they move to this entirely different class of enterprise host. The fact that platforms like Omny and ART19 double their market share in the top 1k was a huge surprise to me, and it really shows how different the needs of top-tier podcasts are.
-
Megaphone: The Undisputed Top Player. I was aware of Megaphone, but I was still shocked by its dominance (28.9% of the top 1k). What makes this even more impressive is that many shows with first-party RSS feeds (like
feeds.npr.org) are actually using Megaphone behind the scenes to deliver their audio files. This white-label approach lets publishers maintain brand control while leveraging Megaphone's powerful ad tech—clearly the winning strategy for top-tier monetization.
Methodology (My Detective Work)
My methodology had a few layers to get the real story.
- First, I did the easy part: classifying feeds from obvious URLs like
feeds.simplecast.com. - But for the tricky ones (custom domains or weird URLs), I did what I call an "enclosure sniff." I peeked inside the RSS file to find the URL for the actual audio file. This let me separate the brand (the RSS feed) from the engine (the audio delivery platform).
Examples (So You Can Double-Check Me)
Straight-shot mappings
https://feeds.simplecast.com/dxZsm5kX→ Simplecasthttps://feeds.megaphone.fm/stupid-genius→ Megaphonehttps://www.omnycontent.com/d/playlist/.../podcast.rss→ Omnyhttps://rss.art19.com/armchair-expert→ ART19https://feeds.libsyn.com/580095/rss→ Libsyn
Proxy or analytics relay, but still clear
https://rss.pdrl.fm/aad407/feeds.megaphone.fm/views-podcast→ Megaphonehttps://rss.pdrl.fm/5ee0be/feeds.acast.com/public/shows/67894eae7095d15b31e3f226→ Acasthttps://rss.pdrl.fm/e6441b/www.omnycontent.com/.../podcast.rss→ Omnyhttps://podcastfeeds.nbcnews.com/HL4TzgYC→ First-party RSS (NBC News)https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace→ First-party RSS (APM)
Needed the enclosure sniff
-
Quick refresher: the
<enclosure>tag in an RSS feed points to the actual media file, so the host that serves it tells us who delivers the audio. -
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/rss.xml→ First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone -
https://feeds.npr.org/510318/podcast.xml→ First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone -
https://feeds.npr.org/344098539/podcast.xml→ First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone -
https://rss.wbur.org/circleround/podcast→ First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone -
https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace→ First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone
What's next
I'm not sure what I'll investigate next. I might cross-reference hosting with episode length, or I might explore something else. The deeper I go, the more interesting the patterns become.
If you have any interesting ideas or see something I missed, let me know.