Updates for July 2022

Improvements on Podcast API, Podcast Alerts, Podcast Playlists...

Hi there!

This is the 58th full month (4 years and 10 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time - I can’t believe that it’s almost 5 years!

What’s new?

1) A few improvements on PodcastAPI.com

First, added one API endpoint to fetch audience demographics of a podcast: GET /podcasts/{id}/audience - Not all podcasts have audience data, but as time goes, we’ll have bigger coverage.

Second, added "rejected" status for podcast submission: POST /podcasts/submit / - so hosting services can notify their podcaster users if podcasts are rejected by Listen Notes.

Third, upgraded our PodcastAPI.com’s OpenAPI spec to 3.1.0, so we are able to add webhooks to the spec.

Fourth, improved Podcast API tutorials - almost rewrote everything.

By this point, our Podcast API has been used by tons of apps / websites - I’m pretty sure we are the most widely used PodcastAPI.com in production. It’s like we are becoming the infrastructure of the podcast industry. Feel a lot of responsibility!

2) Allow fuzzy match for podcast alerts

We’ve got a tool to monitor podcast mentions: https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-alerts/

Previously, we always automatically added double quotes to a search term to monitor latest podcast mentions. So search queries were always exact matched.

Now, you can do fuzzy search without adding double quotes, which is useful to monitor (sub)domain name mentions.

3) Embed search results to your website

For some search queries (especially a person’s name), you can embed a list of search results to your website now:

4) Improvements on Listen Later playlist

First, added total audio length to an episode playlist - I spent so much time listening to podcasts!!!!

Second, added rss feed to show latest episodes of all podcasts in a podcast playlist (Example):

Recently, we’ve seen an interesting use case of our Listen Later playlists -

Automatic podcast curation newsletter!

The basic idea is to use a Listen Later playlist’s rss + Mailchimp/ConvertKit’s RSS-driven email campaigns.

Mailchimp / ConvertKit will check Listen Later playlist’s rss periodically (e.g., daily, weekly…) and automatically send an email campaign with newly added podcasts or episodes. It’s like using a headless CMS.

5) Fixed a bug of searching ‘s in a podcast name

For example, searching nature's archive failed previously. Now it works.

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Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)