Tag: Jetpack

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, bringing podcasting to Jetpack.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Rob Pugh and Tony Arcangelini. Rob and Tony are longstanding members of the Automattic team with extensive backgrounds in marketing, product, and software development. They’ve spent years building tools for creators, writers, podcasters, and everyone in between, and now they’re fully immersed in WordPress’s evolving podcasting capabilities.

If you’ve been looking for ways to run your podcast from your own WordPress site, this conversation is for you. Rob and Tony dive into the new Jetpack podcasting features, and why they made the leap from WordPress.com’s basic audio offerings, to a more robust, integrated solution, within Jetpack.

They talk about what makes WordPress and Jetpack such a powerful home for creators. The ability to bring your newsletter, blog, podcast, and all your content and communication under one roof, all while keeping ownership of your data.

We talk through the advantages of keeping your content out of walled gardens like Substack and Patreon, and the value of flexibility, whether that’s adding WooCommerce to sell merch or customising your site’s look.

Rob and Tony breakdown just how easy it is to start your show. Drop audio into a post, set your category, and let Jetpack handle the rest. From distributing your RSS feed to major podcast apps, to sending out newsletters, and automated social posts. They also get into how integrations with PocketCasts and Jetpack AI make content creation, transcription, and distribution smoother than ever before. Plus how WordPress is open Foundation promises you’ll never be locked in.

If you are a creator wondering how the next generation of podcasting fits into the WordPress ecosystem, or just want an easier way to launch and grow your show, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Rob Pugh and Tony Arcangelini.

I am joined on the podcast by Rob Pugh and Tony Arcangelini. Hello, both.

[00:03:23] Rob Pugh: Hey, how’s it going, Nathan?

[00:03:24] Tony: Hello, Nathan.

[00:03:25] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you both with us.

Today we’re going to be talking about something which is actually genuinely dear to my heart because we’re going on about podcasts. Yay!

I’ve been in the podcasting space for decades, and WordPress has been the place where I’ve done it every single episode. I’m entirely indebted to WordPress for the capacity to do all of the podcasting I’ve done. But I’ve never done it inside of Jetpack, because until recently, I don’t think that was possible. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

First of all, I’ll just go round the houses. I’ll start with Rob. Would you mind giving us just a quick potted bio of what it is that you do over at Automattic, Jetpack, whatever it is that you want to mention.

[00:04:04] Rob Pugh: Yeah, so I’ve worked at Automattic for seven years. I’ve been in marketing and now focused more on product, but I like to do a bit of everything. And I work mostly with tools for people that create stuff. So podcasts fit right in there, and we are excited to build out this feature.

[00:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Tony.

[00:04:21] Tony: Yeah. I’ve also worked for Automattic for about eight years now. I do software development, and so I have had firsthand in building everything that we’re talking about today.

[00:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you very much.

Now, just before we started recording, I was on the call with Tony before Rob joined in and you labored the point, not labored, but you mentioned that you were in the sort of creator side of Automattic. I didn’t know that existed, but that to me is about the most interesting bit of any organization. You know, the bit where the musicians come, and the poets come and the writers come and the podcasters, and the videos and the YouTubers, and all of that come. I think that’s really interesting, and I didn’t realise there was a wing of the business entirely aligned to that. But I guess I’ve been schooled, and now I know. So podcasting definitely comes under that banner.

Okay so I didn’t know this existed, and I think it didn’t exist, but maybe Tony can redirect me a little bit here. Podcasting in the WordPress space, I think you could do more or less everything that we’re about to talk about inside of wordpress.com until recently, but now it’s shipped inside of Jetpack. First of all, I’ll just send that one to Tony. Is that true? Is this all like a port of things into Jetpack from .com?

[00:05:32] Tony: I’d say it’s a little bit more than a port. So we built a very basic feature of podcasting in WordPress.com to offer WordPress.com users. It was very basic. It was just the feed. Basically what you see in the free offerings right now. The ability to drag an audio into a post and for that post to then become a podcast episode. And then we had a curated RSS feed that was available. And then very basic, the core basic iTunes tags that are needed to be able to be picked up by these apps.

That existed there. It was a bit outdated. It hadn’t been touched in a long time, and so we felt like it would be a great tool to leverage for creators. Giving them a better product, something that would be useful with stats and the ability to manage your episodes and all of that. And we figured if we were going to put all this effort into it, that we should probably make it more widely available. And so Jetpack was, I think, the natural fit for us.

[00:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m kind of curious how it’s ended up in Jetpack and not just its own plugin. Is it because you’re leveraging the other things that Jetpack can do? Are there sort of dependencies, if you know what I mean, where, okay, it just makes sense because Jetpack already does that piece of the puzzle, and we can just build over the top of that?

Or is it just the brand recognition, the fact that you’ve got an email list that you don’t need to convert and they can just toggle a switch and automatically have got podcasts? What was the reasoning on putting it inside of Jetpack and not just its own thing?

[00:06:54] Tony: I would say, at least from an engineering perspective, there’s stuff that’s in it that is exclusively within Jetpack. So, the ability to do stats, that’s a hard thing to do when you’re having a self-hosted site, to be able to watch and see what apps are actually touching those download files, and then be able to aggregate them all in one place and then give them back to you in a way that’s easy.

So, at least from an architectural perspective, Jetpack was the easiest because it allows us to leverage some of the endpoints that are already there, and use a lot of those tools.

But then secondly, I think it’s also from an overall product perspective, being able to put it alongside other features like newsletters. Where you can have a newsletter, you can be able to take it into the reader. Have this one episode that now spans across multiple different avenues to be consumed, is I think, also another big benefit in putting it into Jetpack. As opposed to just dropping another, because there’s already a lot of plugins out there, a few big plugins that you can grab for free that do podcasting.

[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the big bits that I realised early on in my podcasting journey was that you’re not really just trying to create an audio feed. It’s more useful as a podcast if you’ve got this kind of wrap around thing. So like you say, you’ve got a home which is yours, AKA your WordPress website. But also things like the capacity to send out an email if people are interested in subscribing, and they don’t necessarily have a podcast player that they use all the time, but they do want to consume your content.

The fact that they can subscribe to a newsletter, you click publish, that newsletter automatically drops in their inbox. It just makes sense that all the jigsaw pieces that a podcaster needs, it feels like WordPress has had forever.

And there is some part of me which is curious that it’s taken this long to come into the, let’s say, .org side of WordPress. Because all of the different parts, the newsletter, the RSS feed, the blog posting, all of that stuff has been available. It just kind of never got joined up. It strikes me as odd because people have moved over to Patreon, Substack has become this whole thing over the last decade. And really it felt like WordPress had that audience a decade ago.

Maybe it’ll claw it back. I certainly hope it does, but it feels like a lot of people have left the WordPress ecosystem for their podcasting because that stuff wasn’t available. Rob, maybe you want to take that one? It’s not really a question, more of an observation.

[00:09:16] Rob Pugh: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. I agree. I think we were a little late in bringing some of these tools to wordpress.org. But I think we’re seeing the renewed focus across the technology space on ownership.

WordPress has remained the best way to do that. And for us to be able to offer these tools to users. It shows everyone that you can, as you said, own your blog your newsletter, your podcast, together. And it does make sense for us to offer all of these tools in one space.

I like to think of it going back to the origins of WordPress, and we started as blogging, everyone getting your thoughts out there and sharing them. Meeting new people, engaging and creating communities. And podcast is just another medium. We provide that for the written word, so of course we should try and provide that for the spoken word as well. So I do hope that we can show people the benefits, and the ease of having it all together and come back and give us a try.

[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think for me at least anyway, that argument is embedded in my soul. The idea of owning your own content on the web is really important. It’d be interesting to see in the year 2026, 2027 and going forward how much that stuff really matters. I’m just curious, in the age of AI whether people still want to own anything at all. But it’ll be certainly interesting to see.

[00:10:30] Rob Pugh: Sorry, yeah, weigh in on that. I think we’ve seen it over decades and comes in waves. When social media started it was really exciting, and people ran and then saw some of the pitfalls, and they start coming back.

And then recently you mentioned Substack, and I loved Substack when it started. It was a space for some serious dialogue, and a place for writers engage. And then over time, well, we need that VC money, and now it’s basically another social media site. And you realise, oh I don’t really own my data, I just own a Substack, and how valuable is that? And it’s coming back.

And I think AI, it’s becoming even, the cycles are quicker now. AI’s incredible, I use it all the time. I use it to help come up with prototypes for how to best display this podcast product. But, you’ll see quickly that you don’t own anything, and you need to have a home like WordPress. And you retain ownership of your audience, and your data and your posts and your podcasts, and that’s, I think, never going to go away, and AI’s only going to reinforce that for people.

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think one of the curious things as well is if you want to do anything outside of the normal that the platform will allow, so let’s take the example of Substack. There’s a limited subset of things that it can do. The bedrock of what it does I’m sure is excellent. I confess I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen many people deploy it for their own podcast, so you know, it must work.

But the minute you want to stray outside of those boundaries, and you want to do something a little bit different, I don’t know, you might want to sell some merchandise or something like that. Well just pop WooCommerce on top of your website and you’re off to the races.

Or, I don’t know, you want to have a different flavor in the way it looks at Christmas or something, well you just adapt the theme. And I’m, imagining good luck doing that over on these proprietary platforms. I don’t know if that’s possible, but it certainly would be a lot harder than it would be on the WordPress side I would have thought.

[00:12:08] Rob Pugh: For sure the customisation expanding is all very important, but to me even more important is just that it feels like Substack is just another platform that’s changing the rules on their people midstream, and if you don’t like the direction of. Like tried it before and it was nice to have a non-social media site to have serious writing and reading of other serious authors, and now I’m getting short form reel videos on my homepage, and I didn’t sign up for this.

And if you’re a creator over there, you might be stuck. How do you port your audience over? It’s technically possible, so they say they’re open, but it’s a pain, and people don’t want to leave. And if you’re actually successful, they take 10%, which is great when you’re zero paid subscribers. But, there’s people paying $10,000 a month to Substack.

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: They take 10%?

[00:12:49] Rob Pugh: 10% no matter what, which is great if you’re free, but if you have 100 paid subscribers paying you $10 a month, suddenly it’s insane. Like it’s a terrible deal and people feel stuck. Like WordPress even, wordpress.com, jetpack, if don’t like those rules, we can’t change them too much. You can go to any of the other great podcast hosts, or plugins.

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that’s a curious thing. And then you can embed those on your WordPress website and just carry right on as if nothing had happened. Yeah, that’s a really interesting point.

[00:13:15] Rob Pugh: Exactly.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: So from what I’ve seen, it looks like a really simple solution to implement. What I mean by that is, as a user of your product, it seems like you’re basically doing a bunch of stuff which as a WordPress user you would be simply doing anyway.

Like, you create a post. I don’t know if there’s a requirement to have a special custom post type for a podcast, or if you can just use regular posts. You go in, drop some audio in, and kind of you’re off to the races. Type some text and what have you.

Is it really as simple as that? Is it simply a case of make a post, drop some audio in? Or is there some stuff that you need to do in advance to prepare your podcast? So I’m leading you up the garden path with that question. Tell us how it works. What do you need to do in order to get started? How much work is involved?

[00:13:59] Tony: Yeah, I think that’s it. There are a few settings that are naturally required for starting a show. So you have your typical art for your show. You’ve got to set your categories and things like that in a setting. But then once that’s all set up, all you do is you create a new post, drop in the audio. We actually have an audio block as well, like a podcast episode block that will pull in a lot of the newer, fancier, podcasting 2.0 markup as well for you to do like chapters and things like that. And then that’s it.

As long as it’s within the category, it’s not a custom post type, it’s just a regular post. And then we are able to differentiate between an episode and just a post by two things. One, is it in the designated category that you set? And two, does it have the audio or video? We also have a few video files that we allow as well, and that’s it.

[00:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really neat. So you can use a regular WordPress post, but if you don’t assign it the category, let’s say in this case I’ve named it podcast, let’s go with that. If you don’t assign that category, it’s a regular post. Nothing off that tries to smuggle its way into your RSS feed, which would be attempted to be consumed by a podcast player. It just doesn’t go in there.

The minute I assign the category of podcast, drop in some audio, then it’s in that separate RSS feed. Dear listener, if you’re not familiar with that, basically a podcast is an RSS feed. That is literally what it is. Your podcast player is just consuming a bunch of text, which is an RSS feed, and interpreting that in a certain way with images and the audio and what have you.

And so that’s it. That’s all you have to do. Configure the settings, put a piece of audio in, assign the category, click publish. You’re done.

[00:15:35] Tony: Yep, that’s all. That’s all it is. I think the harder part is trying to come up with the titles and filling out the show notes. And, I have a friend who I got to start a podcast when we were working on this product, and he was using it, giving us feedback. But then, it’s like I looked at his podcast, and it was literally just like episode one, and it just, he’s like, “That’s the hard part, is coming up with all of the other stuff.”

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: But you have Jetpack AI as well, don’t you? So there is an opportunity, I would presume, to lean into that. If you were to write a corpus of text that went alongside the, I don’t know, the audio, it could be a transcript or what have you. Presumably then Jetpack can go sift through all of that, and suggest some sensible titles if you really can’t be bothered to work out a title for the podcast episode. But then again, does it have the capacity to do things like trawl through the audio and transcribe and things like that? Or is that a bit roadmap-y still?

[00:16:20] Tony: Yeah. So that was one of the things that we wanted to work on was the ability to transcribe. And, because we have the privilege of working closely with Pocket Casts, we have, a lot of fancy tools that they have built already for their podcasting platform that we were going to try and leverage for the podcast show.

[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: Pocket Casts is an Android, iOS, and, it’s a web player as well. It’s a place where you go download onto your phone or what have you and play them. I have it, I use it every single week, and I’ve noticed that whether a transcript is made or not, Pocket Casts actually makes one.

[00:16:54] Tony: Yep.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So if I ship a podcast without a transcript, Pocket Casts magically has a transcript. So I don’t know where that voodoo is happening. But that technology, you can then do double duty on that. You can take the technology they’ve built, use it in the Jetpack side of things, and do the transcription. Okay, that’s neat. Sorry, I interrupted. Apologies.

[00:17:11] Tony: You’re good. Yeah, that’s all of it. That’s, it right there.

[00:17:13] Rob Pugh: I think that’s a great segue into Pocket Casts, which in our opinion is the best app to listen to podcasts. The best platform. And one of the really cool things we were able to do with, because we work closely with Pocket Casts, is when you are distributing your podcast. We pick, just to start, the six biggest ones and hold your hand on submitting to them. But Pocket Casts is actually Automattic. Automattic, you can spell it with one or two Ts. And, if you click the button, it just is uploaded to their network It takes minutes, and it’s, some of the other ones, we hold your hand, but it’s a little annoying, and some of them can take a couple days, like Apple, to approve things. But, Pocket Casts just works. I don’t know if you want to add anything on that magic, Tony.

[00:17:52] Tony: Yeah, it’s very simple. It’s like right off the bat. If you already had an episode recorded, you could start a new website, upload your first episode, set your settings, and be on Pocket Casts, I would say, in less than an hour, honestly.

[00:18:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because you’ve got that tight integration.

[00:18:08] Tony: Yeah. It doesn’t say anything for the website configurations, which I’m sure would take more time, but at the very least, if you wanted to get your show out there, it’s a pretty instant approval.

[00:18:17] Nathan Wrigley: I think podcast players. If you’ve never run a podcast, there’s this whole dance that you have to do. The first time you ever try to release an episode, and that is to get it set up with the distribution channels that are popular. So I’m thinking of things like Apple Podcasts, and YouTube Music, and Amazon, and the list goes on and on. There’s, dozens of them, some more important than others. I think probably Apple is probably the biggest one, and maybe Spotify and some others come in second and third place.

But you have to do this thing where in some cases you have to go and get an account, and there’s really no way around that. Do you do some of that heavy lifting though? Do you make it easy for people to understand how to do it? When I did it, like 10 years ago for the first, and thankfully, only time I really ever had to do it, it was a case of going out and Googling it and reading things. But do you have that information in the UI to make that journey a little bit easier, reduce hours to minutes perhaps?

[00:19:07] Tony: Yep, we have a button.

[00:19:08] Rob Pugh: So there’s a distribution tab which lists the, all six like you mentioned, Amazon, Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, Podcast Index, which covers a whole bunch of minor networks. And I’d love to one day have it be fully automatic like it is with Pocket Casts. But some of them you need actual partnerships with these, Apple or Spotify to make that happen, and we haven’t prioritized putting a business person to go start a relationship and that.

So we will organize them for you and try and give clear instructions in our documentation to how to do it. But there is just a button then when you’re looking and it shows you the status of it, if it’s in or not.

[00:19:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you click the button, do the necessary thing, and then it will report back to you whether or not that has been successful. It’s a bit of a strange vestige really of the internet from way back when. It feels like in this day and age of everybody using APIs to connect to this, that, and the other thing.

But companies like Apple seem to be very unwilling to let that bit of their system be wide open. You’ve got to sign up for an Apple Creators account. I forget exactly what it’s called, but you log in and then you submit your RSS feed. It really doesn’t take that long, but you still have to do it.

[00:20:12] Rob Pugh: Yeah.

[00:20:13] Nathan Wrigley: And I think they’re doing it because they get to see from the inside out, how popular your podcast is. And I don’t know, maybe they can monetize things from their end. I’m not really sure how that works.

[00:20:23] Rob Pugh: It’s really another example of the closed internet.

[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:26] Rob Pugh: Which is terrible. Why does Apple and Spotify need to be closed? So I think with having your podcast on WordPress with Jetpack, wordpress.com, and being in Pocket Casts, great. Then you’re, in the more of the open garden which is a better place to be.

And the cool thing with our stats, you can see who’s coming, like how many people are listening to your show on Apple versus Spotify versus Pocket Casts. So you know if you’re not getting any from Spotify, then you don’t even need to be there. Of course though, it helps with findability to be everywhere, so we want to give you that option.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an RSS feed, which if it’s on your WordPress website presumably contains your domain name, forward slash, I don’t know, feed forward slash something maybe. So your RSS feed is going to be fairly short, probably very on message.

Does it work that way or does it have some sort of Jetpack or, I don’t know, WordPress.com thing in it? Because when you go to these other platforms, it’s typically platformname.com/randomstringof12characters or something like that, which is very hard to read out in your podcast. But the way you’ve got it built, it sounds like the sort of thing that would trip off the tongue. So you know, wptavern.com/podcast. Put that into your podcast player of choice and you’re done. I’m saying all of that like that’s true, but I don’t know if it is.

[00:21:40] Tony: Yeah, that’s it. Slash feed at the end.

[00:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:21:43] Tony: Because it is an RSS feed, yeah.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s still fairly straightforward. But again, that’s a nice bit of branding, isn’t it? And, I think that’s really good.

Linking it back to the branding. We touched on this a minute ago, but if you haven’t started a podcast before, it may not be entirely obvious that you do want those other things like a newsletter, and like the ability to post to socials, and it feels like you’ve got the complete wraparound solution for that.

Because as your podcast grows, which let’s hope it does, then you will probably wish to have a relationship with your listeners via an email newsletter. You probably will wish to be posting on social media. You probably will wish to do all of these different things. So social posting, newsletter, RSS feed, WordPress as the sort of custodian of all the text and the images and the videos that I put in. Is there any other secret sauce that we’ve missed there? Is there any other sort of unique binding that Jetpack brings that we haven’t mentioned there?

[00:22:37] Rob Pugh: I’ll take it back first to like why we started this, and decided to build this, and I think you’re exactly right. First we found there are lots of WordPress.com and Jetpack users who have podcasts somewhere else. And that’s fine, but they were forced to because we didn’t offer it, and that really makes sense. Why would you need to go somewhere else?

So you say today, our goal in creating it was twofold for the people creating the platform. It should just be as easy as possible. Podcasting and writing is hard enough. You should focus on that. Let us handle all the difficult stuff.

Like you said, you need to, have a newsletter and a podcast and a blog and own all of it, and why can’t you do that with one publish event? And then from the consumer’s side of like consumer of content, some people want to listen to only podcasts, and some people want to read on a blog or, say, the WordPress.com reader. Shout out, go check that out if you haven’t in a while.

And like me, I prefer to actually read stuff in my email inbox, like a old weirdo. It shouldn’t be, you should let people consume however they want to, and it shouldn’t be a lot of extra work for you, the host, the creator, to manage all of these things on different platforms. Just have it be as simple as possible, and that was really our goal. And then, yes, exactly what you said with all the other Jetpack stuff. Social media is a great one. Gosh, you could go on and on. Performance, security, basics.

[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it binds to, you said it just then, and it binds to the one publish event. So when I began my podcasting journey you end up with, like all these Zapier connections and different ways that, I don’t know, a webhook which goes off here and does a particular thing because you want it to be posted to this social network. With this, once you’ve got all of the bits and pieces configured, you click publish.

So you know, you do your audio, you write your text, you do all of that in a draft state, upload the audio. But the moment you click publish, the newsletter goes out, the social media posts go out, and all of that just happens automatically. And you don’t have to think about it. And they’re already there in your website.

It’s not like you have to do much. You just toggle, actually we should talk about that. You have to toggle the Jetpack podcast setting on, and presumably the newsletter setting, and yada yada, all those other things. But once you’ve toggled all those things on and got them set up, every time you click publish, all of those dominoes fall, and everything just happens on autopilot, which is really nice.

What do we need to toggle on? How do we set it up? How expensive is it? Let’s start there.

[00:24:50] Rob Pugh: I’ll talk about the pricing and then Tony can talk about the, the toggles.

[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Excellent. Yeah.

[00:24:55] Rob Pugh: Yeah, we talked a bit about the pricing. I think that Automattic has always had a really generous free tier across its products, and it made sense for us to continue that. So you can today go to WordPress.com and start a blog for free.

It’s going to have some ads on it, but it’s free. You can have your newsletter sent out unlimited sends for free with unlimited subscribers, and unlimited podcasts for free. That’s like, amazing deal. We don’t get enough credit for that, but cool.

But we did build some compelling things to make you hopefully want to upgrade, or as you grow your podcast, you’ll find valuable. I think the stats are really cool. To me, all of the essential stats and none of the unessential stats, which if you’re an advanced podcaster might not be as good as you’re looking for. But, for most novice users, you just want to know the basics.

Anything beyond that starts to feel like Google Analytics, like, I’m lost. So just give me the basic. Are they coming on Apple? Where, how many listeners to which episodes, and where in the world are they coming from? Which refers, like which sites are they coming from? That’s a great starting place for me.

Help with distribution, the episode list, having a clear place for all your podcast episodes, the podcast block, really cool. And on WordPress.com too, we include the audio hosting once you upgrade. It’s not on Jetpack yet, so we’re waiting to see if, because we offer a similar thing for VideoPress, shout out best video hosting for WordPress.

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s VideoPress will handle the video side of things. That’s becoming the thing, by the way. I’m sure you know that. But in the podcasting space, I went to The Podcast Show in London, about four months ago or something like that. Everybody’s talking about video.

[00:26:22] Rob Pugh: Yeah.

[00:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: And so that being bound into Jetpack as well is just another string to your bow. I’m just going to segue slightly. I think Pocket Cast does a pretty good job of doing things like HLS video. I could be wrong about that, but I’ve got a feeling it does.

[00:26:35] Rob Pugh: They even hook up with your Apple TV now, so you can watch and listen and yeah.

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so this is really clever and completely out of the realms of possibility just a year ago. So you could be listening on your headphones whilst you’re out walking the dog on your podcast player, so you’re only listening to audio. And you come back in, put your Apple TV on, turn on the Pocket Cast player, and it will seamlessly drop you right in the video at the exact moment where you finished the dog walk. It’s so clever and so neat. I love all that stuff.

[00:27:08] Rob Pugh: The future is so cool.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:10] Rob Pugh: I love it.

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So Tony, how do we switch it on? Is it genuinely one toggle in the Jetpack settings, or is there a little bit more to be set up?

[00:27:17] Tony: Yeah, more or less. There is one toggle to turn the module on. And then once it’s on, you go to Jetpack and click on the podcast option, and then from there, there should just be one button that is to set up your show.

And all it really requires is you either creating a new category or selecting a category. And this is, as we were talking about before, the category feed that is going to be taken over from there. And then you technically are done. But it’s advised that you fill out all of the other base settings, and we walk you through all of the ones that are required by the podcast show apps, to make sure that you don’t get blocked by Apple or Spotify for not having the necessary settings.

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: If I’ve been a podcaster for a number of years and I’ve got, I don’t know, a back catalog of 100 episodes or something like that. How do we handle that? How do we bring in previous episodes? And is there like an automated way of doing that or do I have to go and refigure 100 brand new pages on my WordPress website?

Is there any heavy lifting done there? Let’s just deal with the audio first, just the RSS feed and the audio. Is it a simple case of dropping the old podcast RSS feed in and you’ll capture all that audio and it’ll be on the Jetpack side of things? Let’s do that first.

[00:28:28] Tony: That’s a great question. I am not super familiar with the Core WordPress importer, but I believe that if there is a valid RSS feed with the normal RSS style tags, like enclosure and things like that, you should be able to import your RSS feed. Depending on how it’s configured on your current host, directly into WordPress. I’m not too sure what that would result in exactly. Especially because there’s a lot of different hosts out there, and it’s not like there’s one standard format for exporting your content. But yeah, that should get you part of the way there.

Then I think in the future, we’re really looking to start targeting some of the major current podcast hosts to be able to configure a migration flow to be able to come from those places to ours, in a more seamless way, albeit whatever sort of export they can give you or, whatnot. But I think that’s still on the horizon.

[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’d be really nice to, let’s say I have 100 episodes and I’ve got, it’s over on whatever, hosting platform X over there, for my podcast audio feed. It’d be nice to be able to just suck in all the descriptions, and all the titles and have them be created as WordPress posts with the category assigned. So that essentially my WordPress site with the click of a button and the wait of an hour has suddenly got 100 posts of the podcast type all ready to go. And then, that’ll sit inside my SEO sitemap and all of that kind of stuff. That would be really interesting to be able to do, I think.

[00:29:58] Rob Pugh: Yeah, I think we will try and have that in the future. We usually do try and make importing, especially from closed platforms, super easy. An example, another Substack. We have an amazing Substack importer. They’re not a big podcaster yet, but they, do have some, and we can look at adding that. But if you have all of your newsletter on Substack, you click a button and we bring over your whole, build you a website, bring over all your posts, all your subscribers, even paid subscribers. We seamlessly transfer it to the Stripe account. Everything we’re building, we’re just trying to make it super easy for people to own your data, go wherever you want. We encourage movement in and out, wherever you want to go, it’s up to you.

[00:30:31] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose that then leads me to this question, which is, and you’ve probably just answered it. You’re not holding people behind some sort of paywall here. If people try Jetpack Podcasts out and they decide, “You know what? I really want to go the other direction. I want to maybe go back to where I was, or just move to a new host,” or what have you. You’re not holding any of that hostage, are you? You can take it and run with it and put it somewhere else?

[00:30:52] Rob Pugh: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely not. Like that’s the, I think, one of the fundamentals of WordPress. You should be able to move within WordPress and out as much as you want. I will say that this is a new feature that me and Tony have built. Just because something doesn’t exist in a super streamlined way, doesn’t mean it’s our intention to lock you in. So please reach out and we’ll happily help you migrate off if that’s your wish.

[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: So I’ll just let you know, dear listener, that there’s several URLs which rather than read them, because in many cases they can be quite long. But one of them, which is really easy for me to say, I might as well do that one, is wordpress.com/podcast. That’s probably the easiest one. Oh, and maybe this one as well, jetpack.com/support/jetpack-podcast. There’s several more.

[00:31:38] Rob Pugh: Let me jump in. Let me sorry, Because as of two days ago, we now have jetpack.com/podcast.

[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That’s way better.

[00:31:46] Rob Pugh: We just relaunched the entire jetpack.com site, which is cool. You should go check it out. Yeah, so.

[00:31:51] Nathan Wrigley: Again though, that, so what was that? Jetpack.com/podcast is kind of the home for all of those bits and pieces.

[00:31:56] Rob Pugh: Yep, exactly.

[00:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, go there. That’s where you’re going to find all of the bits and pieces and I presume, when things are, adapted and modified.

[00:32:03] Rob Pugh: Yeah, the way to think about it’s still for some people confusing about Jetpack. So if you would like a website, the best WordPress hosting, then go to wordpress.com/podcast, and we’ll host your podcast for you. And if you want to host somewhere else, that’s great. Go host your WordPress site somewhere else, then go to jetpack.com/podcast and we’ll get you all set up as well.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you Rob, and thank you, Tony. Thanks so much for chatting to me, both of you.

[00:32:28] Rob Pugh: Yeah. Thank you Nathan.

[00:32:28] Tony: Yep, thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, bringing podcasting to Jetpack.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Rob Pugh and Tony Arcangelini. Rob and Tony are longstanding members of the Automattic team with extensive backgrounds in marketing, product, and software development. They’ve spent years building tools for creators, writers, podcasters, and everyone in between, and now they’re fully immersed in WordPress’s evolving podcasting capabilities.

If you’ve been looking for ways to run your podcast from your own WordPress site, this conversation is for you. Rob and Tony dive into the new Jetpack podcasting features, and why they made the leap from WordPress.com’s basic audio offerings, to a more robust, integrated solution, within Jetpack.

They talk about what makes WordPress and Jetpack such a powerful home for creators. The ability to bring your newsletter, blog, podcast, and all your content and communication under one roof, all while keeping ownership of your data.

We talk through the advantages of keeping your content out of walled gardens like Substack and Patreon, and the value of flexibility, whether that’s adding WooCommerce to sell merch or customising your site’s look.

Rob and Tony breakdown just how easy it is to start your show. Drop audio into a post, set your category, and let Jetpack handle the rest. From distributing your RSS feed to major podcast apps, to sending out newsletters, and automated social posts. They also get into how integrations with PocketCasts and Jetpack AI make content creation, transcription, and distribution smoother than ever before. Plus how WordPress is open Foundation promises you’ll never be locked in.

If you are a creator wondering how the next generation of podcasting fits into the WordPress ecosystem, or just want an easier way to launch and grow your show, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Rob Pugh and Tony Arcangelini.

I am joined on the podcast by Rob Pugh and Tony Arcangelini. Hello, both.

[00:03:23] Rob Pugh: Hey, how’s it going, Nathan?

[00:03:24] Tony: Hello, Nathan.

[00:03:25] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you both with us.

Today we’re going to be talking about something which is actually genuinely dear to my heart because we’re going on about podcasts. Yay!

I’ve been in the podcasting space for decades, and WordPress has been the place where I’ve done it every single episode. I’m entirely indebted to WordPress for the capacity to do all of the podcasting I’ve done. But I’ve never done it inside of Jetpack, because until recently, I don’t think that was possible. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

First of all, I’ll just go round the houses. I’ll start with Rob. Would you mind giving us just a quick potted bio of what it is that you do over at Automattic, Jetpack, whatever it is that you want to mention.

[00:04:04] Rob Pugh: Yeah, so I’ve worked at Automattic for seven years. I’ve been in marketing and now focused more on product, but I like to do a bit of everything. And I work mostly with tools for people that create stuff. So podcasts fit right in there, and we are excited to build out this feature.

[00:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Tony.

[00:04:21] Tony: Yeah. I’ve also worked for Automattic for about eight years now. I do software development, and so I have had firsthand in building everything that we’re talking about today.

[00:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you very much.

Now, just before we started recording, I was on the call with Tony before Rob joined in and you labored the point, not labored, but you mentioned that you were in the sort of creator side of Automattic. I didn’t know that existed, but that to me is about the most interesting bit of any organization. You know, the bit where the musicians come, and the poets come and the writers come and the podcasters, and the videos and the YouTubers, and all of that come. I think that’s really interesting, and I didn’t realise there was a wing of the business entirely aligned to that. But I guess I’ve been schooled, and now I know. So podcasting definitely comes under that banner.

Okay so I didn’t know this existed, and I think it didn’t exist, but maybe Tony can redirect me a little bit here. Podcasting in the WordPress space, I think you could do more or less everything that we’re about to talk about inside of wordpress.com until recently, but now it’s shipped inside of Jetpack. First of all, I’ll just send that one to Tony. Is that true? Is this all like a port of things into Jetpack from .com?

[00:05:32] Tony: I’d say it’s a little bit more than a port. So we built a very basic feature of podcasting in WordPress.com to offer WordPress.com users. It was very basic. It was just the feed. Basically what you see in the free offerings right now. The ability to drag an audio into a post and for that post to then become a podcast episode. And then we had a curated RSS feed that was available. And then very basic, the core basic iTunes tags that are needed to be able to be picked up by these apps.

That existed there. It was a bit outdated. It hadn’t been touched in a long time, and so we felt like it would be a great tool to leverage for creators. Giving them a better product, something that would be useful with stats and the ability to manage your episodes and all of that. And we figured if we were going to put all this effort into it, that we should probably make it more widely available. And so Jetpack was, I think, the natural fit for us.

[00:06:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m kind of curious how it’s ended up in Jetpack and not just its own plugin. Is it because you’re leveraging the other things that Jetpack can do? Are there sort of dependencies, if you know what I mean, where, okay, it just makes sense because Jetpack already does that piece of the puzzle, and we can just build over the top of that?

Or is it just the brand recognition, the fact that you’ve got an email list that you don’t need to convert and they can just toggle a switch and automatically have got podcasts? What was the reasoning on putting it inside of Jetpack and not just its own thing?

[00:06:54] Tony: I would say, at least from an engineering perspective, there’s stuff that’s in it that is exclusively within Jetpack. So, the ability to do stats, that’s a hard thing to do when you’re having a self-hosted site, to be able to watch and see what apps are actually touching those download files, and then be able to aggregate them all in one place and then give them back to you in a way that’s easy.

So, at least from an architectural perspective, Jetpack was the easiest because it allows us to leverage some of the endpoints that are already there, and use a lot of those tools.

But then secondly, I think it’s also from an overall product perspective, being able to put it alongside other features like newsletters. Where you can have a newsletter, you can be able to take it into the reader. Have this one episode that now spans across multiple different avenues to be consumed, is I think, also another big benefit in putting it into Jetpack. As opposed to just dropping another, because there’s already a lot of plugins out there, a few big plugins that you can grab for free that do podcasting.

[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the big bits that I realised early on in my podcasting journey was that you’re not really just trying to create an audio feed. It’s more useful as a podcast if you’ve got this kind of wrap around thing. So like you say, you’ve got a home which is yours, AKA your WordPress website. But also things like the capacity to send out an email if people are interested in subscribing, and they don’t necessarily have a podcast player that they use all the time, but they do want to consume your content.

The fact that they can subscribe to a newsletter, you click publish, that newsletter automatically drops in their inbox. It just makes sense that all the jigsaw pieces that a podcaster needs, it feels like WordPress has had forever.

And there is some part of me which is curious that it’s taken this long to come into the, let’s say, .org side of WordPress. Because all of the different parts, the newsletter, the RSS feed, the blog posting, all of that stuff has been available. It just kind of never got joined up. It strikes me as odd because people have moved over to Patreon, Substack has become this whole thing over the last decade. And really it felt like WordPress had that audience a decade ago.

Maybe it’ll claw it back. I certainly hope it does, but it feels like a lot of people have left the WordPress ecosystem for their podcasting because that stuff wasn’t available. Rob, maybe you want to take that one? It’s not really a question, more of an observation.

[00:09:16] Rob Pugh: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. I agree. I think we were a little late in bringing some of these tools to wordpress.org. But I think we’re seeing the renewed focus across the technology space on ownership.

WordPress has remained the best way to do that. And for us to be able to offer these tools to users. It shows everyone that you can, as you said, own your blog your newsletter, your podcast, together. And it does make sense for us to offer all of these tools in one space.

I like to think of it going back to the origins of WordPress, and we started as blogging, everyone getting your thoughts out there and sharing them. Meeting new people, engaging and creating communities. And podcast is just another medium. We provide that for the written word, so of course we should try and provide that for the spoken word as well. So I do hope that we can show people the benefits, and the ease of having it all together and come back and give us a try.

[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think for me at least anyway, that argument is embedded in my soul. The idea of owning your own content on the web is really important. It’d be interesting to see in the year 2026, 2027 and going forward how much that stuff really matters. I’m just curious, in the age of AI whether people still want to own anything at all. But it’ll be certainly interesting to see.

[00:10:30] Rob Pugh: Sorry, yeah, weigh in on that. I think we’ve seen it over decades and comes in waves. When social media started it was really exciting, and people ran and then saw some of the pitfalls, and they start coming back.

And then recently you mentioned Substack, and I loved Substack when it started. It was a space for some serious dialogue, and a place for writers engage. And then over time, well, we need that VC money, and now it’s basically another social media site. And you realise, oh I don’t really own my data, I just own a Substack, and how valuable is that? And it’s coming back.

And I think AI, it’s becoming even, the cycles are quicker now. AI’s incredible, I use it all the time. I use it to help come up with prototypes for how to best display this podcast product. But, you’ll see quickly that you don’t own anything, and you need to have a home like WordPress. And you retain ownership of your audience, and your data and your posts and your podcasts, and that’s, I think, never going to go away, and AI’s only going to reinforce that for people.

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think one of the curious things as well is if you want to do anything outside of the normal that the platform will allow, so let’s take the example of Substack. There’s a limited subset of things that it can do. The bedrock of what it does I’m sure is excellent. I confess I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen many people deploy it for their own podcast, so you know, it must work.

But the minute you want to stray outside of those boundaries, and you want to do something a little bit different, I don’t know, you might want to sell some merchandise or something like that. Well just pop WooCommerce on top of your website and you’re off to the races.

Or, I don’t know, you want to have a different flavor in the way it looks at Christmas or something, well you just adapt the theme. And I’m, imagining good luck doing that over on these proprietary platforms. I don’t know if that’s possible, but it certainly would be a lot harder than it would be on the WordPress side I would have thought.

[00:12:08] Rob Pugh: For sure the customisation expanding is all very important, but to me even more important is just that it feels like Substack is just another platform that’s changing the rules on their people midstream, and if you don’t like the direction of. Like tried it before and it was nice to have a non-social media site to have serious writing and reading of other serious authors, and now I’m getting short form reel videos on my homepage, and I didn’t sign up for this.

And if you’re a creator over there, you might be stuck. How do you port your audience over? It’s technically possible, so they say they’re open, but it’s a pain, and people don’t want to leave. And if you’re actually successful, they take 10%, which is great when you’re zero paid subscribers. But, there’s people paying $10,000 a month to Substack.

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: They take 10%?

[00:12:49] Rob Pugh: 10% no matter what, which is great if you’re free, but if you have 100 paid subscribers paying you $10 a month, suddenly it’s insane. Like it’s a terrible deal and people feel stuck. Like WordPress even, wordpress.com, jetpack, if don’t like those rules, we can’t change them too much. You can go to any of the other great podcast hosts, or plugins.

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that’s a curious thing. And then you can embed those on your WordPress website and just carry right on as if nothing had happened. Yeah, that’s a really interesting point.

[00:13:15] Rob Pugh: Exactly.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: So from what I’ve seen, it looks like a really simple solution to implement. What I mean by that is, as a user of your product, it seems like you’re basically doing a bunch of stuff which as a WordPress user you would be simply doing anyway.

Like, you create a post. I don’t know if there’s a requirement to have a special custom post type for a podcast, or if you can just use regular posts. You go in, drop some audio in, and kind of you’re off to the races. Type some text and what have you.

Is it really as simple as that? Is it simply a case of make a post, drop some audio in? Or is there some stuff that you need to do in advance to prepare your podcast? So I’m leading you up the garden path with that question. Tell us how it works. What do you need to do in order to get started? How much work is involved?

[00:13:59] Tony: Yeah, I think that’s it. There are a few settings that are naturally required for starting a show. So you have your typical art for your show. You’ve got to set your categories and things like that in a setting. But then once that’s all set up, all you do is you create a new post, drop in the audio. We actually have an audio block as well, like a podcast episode block that will pull in a lot of the newer, fancier, podcasting 2.0 markup as well for you to do like chapters and things like that. And then that’s it.

As long as it’s within the category, it’s not a custom post type, it’s just a regular post. And then we are able to differentiate between an episode and just a post by two things. One, is it in the designated category that you set? And two, does it have the audio or video? We also have a few video files that we allow as well, and that’s it.

[00:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really neat. So you can use a regular WordPress post, but if you don’t assign it the category, let’s say in this case I’ve named it podcast, let’s go with that. If you don’t assign that category, it’s a regular post. Nothing off that tries to smuggle its way into your RSS feed, which would be attempted to be consumed by a podcast player. It just doesn’t go in there.

The minute I assign the category of podcast, drop in some audio, then it’s in that separate RSS feed. Dear listener, if you’re not familiar with that, basically a podcast is an RSS feed. That is literally what it is. Your podcast player is just consuming a bunch of text, which is an RSS feed, and interpreting that in a certain way with images and the audio and what have you.

And so that’s it. That’s all you have to do. Configure the settings, put a piece of audio in, assign the category, click publish. You’re done.

[00:15:35] Tony: Yep, that’s all. That’s all it is. I think the harder part is trying to come up with the titles and filling out the show notes. And, I have a friend who I got to start a podcast when we were working on this product, and he was using it, giving us feedback. But then, it’s like I looked at his podcast, and it was literally just like episode one, and it just, he’s like, “That’s the hard part, is coming up with all of the other stuff.”

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: But you have Jetpack AI as well, don’t you? So there is an opportunity, I would presume, to lean into that. If you were to write a corpus of text that went alongside the, I don’t know, the audio, it could be a transcript or what have you. Presumably then Jetpack can go sift through all of that, and suggest some sensible titles if you really can’t be bothered to work out a title for the podcast episode. But then again, does it have the capacity to do things like trawl through the audio and transcribe and things like that? Or is that a bit roadmap-y still?

[00:16:20] Tony: Yeah. So that was one of the things that we wanted to work on was the ability to transcribe. And, because we have the privilege of working closely with Pocket Casts, we have, a lot of fancy tools that they have built already for their podcasting platform that we were going to try and leverage for the podcast show.

[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: Pocket Casts is an Android, iOS, and, it’s a web player as well. It’s a place where you go download onto your phone or what have you and play them. I have it, I use it every single week, and I’ve noticed that whether a transcript is made or not, Pocket Casts actually makes one.

[00:16:54] Tony: Yep.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So if I ship a podcast without a transcript, Pocket Casts magically has a transcript. So I don’t know where that voodoo is happening. But that technology, you can then do double duty on that. You can take the technology they’ve built, use it in the Jetpack side of things, and do the transcription. Okay, that’s neat. Sorry, I interrupted. Apologies.

[00:17:11] Tony: You’re good. Yeah, that’s all of it. That’s, it right there.

[00:17:13] Rob Pugh: I think that’s a great segue into Pocket Casts, which in our opinion is the best app to listen to podcasts. The best platform. And one of the really cool things we were able to do with, because we work closely with Pocket Casts, is when you are distributing your podcast. We pick, just to start, the six biggest ones and hold your hand on submitting to them. But Pocket Casts is actually Automattic. Automattic, you can spell it with one or two Ts. And, if you click the button, it just is uploaded to their network It takes minutes, and it’s, some of the other ones, we hold your hand, but it’s a little annoying, and some of them can take a couple days, like Apple, to approve things. But, Pocket Casts just works. I don’t know if you want to add anything on that magic, Tony.

[00:17:52] Tony: Yeah, it’s very simple. It’s like right off the bat. If you already had an episode recorded, you could start a new website, upload your first episode, set your settings, and be on Pocket Casts, I would say, in less than an hour, honestly.

[00:18:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because you’ve got that tight integration.

[00:18:08] Tony: Yeah. It doesn’t say anything for the website configurations, which I’m sure would take more time, but at the very least, if you wanted to get your show out there, it’s a pretty instant approval.

[00:18:17] Nathan Wrigley: I think podcast players. If you’ve never run a podcast, there’s this whole dance that you have to do. The first time you ever try to release an episode, and that is to get it set up with the distribution channels that are popular. So I’m thinking of things like Apple Podcasts, and YouTube Music, and Amazon, and the list goes on and on. There’s, dozens of them, some more important than others. I think probably Apple is probably the biggest one, and maybe Spotify and some others come in second and third place.

But you have to do this thing where in some cases you have to go and get an account, and there’s really no way around that. Do you do some of that heavy lifting though? Do you make it easy for people to understand how to do it? When I did it, like 10 years ago for the first, and thankfully, only time I really ever had to do it, it was a case of going out and Googling it and reading things. But do you have that information in the UI to make that journey a little bit easier, reduce hours to minutes perhaps?

[00:19:07] Tony: Yep, we have a button.

[00:19:08] Rob Pugh: So there’s a distribution tab which lists the, all six like you mentioned, Amazon, Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, Podcast Index, which covers a whole bunch of minor networks. And I’d love to one day have it be fully automatic like it is with Pocket Casts. But some of them you need actual partnerships with these, Apple or Spotify to make that happen, and we haven’t prioritized putting a business person to go start a relationship and that.

So we will organize them for you and try and give clear instructions in our documentation to how to do it. But there is just a button then when you’re looking and it shows you the status of it, if it’s in or not.

[00:19:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you click the button, do the necessary thing, and then it will report back to you whether or not that has been successful. It’s a bit of a strange vestige really of the internet from way back when. It feels like in this day and age of everybody using APIs to connect to this, that, and the other thing.

But companies like Apple seem to be very unwilling to let that bit of their system be wide open. You’ve got to sign up for an Apple Creators account. I forget exactly what it’s called, but you log in and then you submit your RSS feed. It really doesn’t take that long, but you still have to do it.

[00:20:12] Rob Pugh: Yeah.

[00:20:13] Nathan Wrigley: And I think they’re doing it because they get to see from the inside out, how popular your podcast is. And I don’t know, maybe they can monetize things from their end. I’m not really sure how that works.

[00:20:23] Rob Pugh: It’s really another example of the closed internet.

[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:20:26] Rob Pugh: Which is terrible. Why does Apple and Spotify need to be closed? So I think with having your podcast on WordPress with Jetpack, wordpress.com, and being in Pocket Casts, great. Then you’re, in the more of the open garden which is a better place to be.

And the cool thing with our stats, you can see who’s coming, like how many people are listening to your show on Apple versus Spotify versus Pocket Casts. So you know if you’re not getting any from Spotify, then you don’t even need to be there. Of course though, it helps with findability to be everywhere, so we want to give you that option.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an RSS feed, which if it’s on your WordPress website presumably contains your domain name, forward slash, I don’t know, feed forward slash something maybe. So your RSS feed is going to be fairly short, probably very on message.

Does it work that way or does it have some sort of Jetpack or, I don’t know, WordPress.com thing in it? Because when you go to these other platforms, it’s typically platformname.com/randomstringof12characters or something like that, which is very hard to read out in your podcast. But the way you’ve got it built, it sounds like the sort of thing that would trip off the tongue. So you know, wptavern.com/podcast. Put that into your podcast player of choice and you’re done. I’m saying all of that like that’s true, but I don’t know if it is.

[00:21:40] Tony: Yeah, that’s it. Slash feed at the end.

[00:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:21:43] Tony: Because it is an RSS feed, yeah.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s still fairly straightforward. But again, that’s a nice bit of branding, isn’t it? And, I think that’s really good.

Linking it back to the branding. We touched on this a minute ago, but if you haven’t started a podcast before, it may not be entirely obvious that you do want those other things like a newsletter, and like the ability to post to socials, and it feels like you’ve got the complete wraparound solution for that.

Because as your podcast grows, which let’s hope it does, then you will probably wish to have a relationship with your listeners via an email newsletter. You probably will wish to be posting on social media. You probably will wish to do all of these different things. So social posting, newsletter, RSS feed, WordPress as the sort of custodian of all the text and the images and the videos that I put in. Is there any other secret sauce that we’ve missed there? Is there any other sort of unique binding that Jetpack brings that we haven’t mentioned there?

[00:22:37] Rob Pugh: I’ll take it back first to like why we started this, and decided to build this, and I think you’re exactly right. First we found there are lots of WordPress.com and Jetpack users who have podcasts somewhere else. And that’s fine, but they were forced to because we didn’t offer it, and that really makes sense. Why would you need to go somewhere else?

So you say today, our goal in creating it was twofold for the people creating the platform. It should just be as easy as possible. Podcasting and writing is hard enough. You should focus on that. Let us handle all the difficult stuff.

Like you said, you need to, have a newsletter and a podcast and a blog and own all of it, and why can’t you do that with one publish event? And then from the consumer’s side of like consumer of content, some people want to listen to only podcasts, and some people want to read on a blog or, say, the WordPress.com reader. Shout out, go check that out if you haven’t in a while.

And like me, I prefer to actually read stuff in my email inbox, like a old weirdo. It shouldn’t be, you should let people consume however they want to, and it shouldn’t be a lot of extra work for you, the host, the creator, to manage all of these things on different platforms. Just have it be as simple as possible, and that was really our goal. And then, yes, exactly what you said with all the other Jetpack stuff. Social media is a great one. Gosh, you could go on and on. Performance, security, basics.

[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it binds to, you said it just then, and it binds to the one publish event. So when I began my podcasting journey you end up with, like all these Zapier connections and different ways that, I don’t know, a webhook which goes off here and does a particular thing because you want it to be posted to this social network. With this, once you’ve got all of the bits and pieces configured, you click publish.

So you know, you do your audio, you write your text, you do all of that in a draft state, upload the audio. But the moment you click publish, the newsletter goes out, the social media posts go out, and all of that just happens automatically. And you don’t have to think about it. And they’re already there in your website.

It’s not like you have to do much. You just toggle, actually we should talk about that. You have to toggle the Jetpack podcast setting on, and presumably the newsletter setting, and yada yada, all those other things. But once you’ve toggled all those things on and got them set up, every time you click publish, all of those dominoes fall, and everything just happens on autopilot, which is really nice.

What do we need to toggle on? How do we set it up? How expensive is it? Let’s start there.

[00:24:50] Rob Pugh: I’ll talk about the pricing and then Tony can talk about the, the toggles.

[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Excellent. Yeah.

[00:24:55] Rob Pugh: Yeah, we talked a bit about the pricing. I think that Automattic has always had a really generous free tier across its products, and it made sense for us to continue that. So you can today go to WordPress.com and start a blog for free.

It’s going to have some ads on it, but it’s free. You can have your newsletter sent out unlimited sends for free with unlimited subscribers, and unlimited podcasts for free. That’s like, amazing deal. We don’t get enough credit for that, but cool.

But we did build some compelling things to make you hopefully want to upgrade, or as you grow your podcast, you’ll find valuable. I think the stats are really cool. To me, all of the essential stats and none of the unessential stats, which if you’re an advanced podcaster might not be as good as you’re looking for. But, for most novice users, you just want to know the basics.

Anything beyond that starts to feel like Google Analytics, like, I’m lost. So just give me the basic. Are they coming on Apple? Where, how many listeners to which episodes, and where in the world are they coming from? Which refers, like which sites are they coming from? That’s a great starting place for me.

Help with distribution, the episode list, having a clear place for all your podcast episodes, the podcast block, really cool. And on WordPress.com too, we include the audio hosting once you upgrade. It’s not on Jetpack yet, so we’re waiting to see if, because we offer a similar thing for VideoPress, shout out best video hosting for WordPress.

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s VideoPress will handle the video side of things. That’s becoming the thing, by the way. I’m sure you know that. But in the podcasting space, I went to The Podcast Show in London, about four months ago or something like that. Everybody’s talking about video.

[00:26:22] Rob Pugh: Yeah.

[00:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: And so that being bound into Jetpack as well is just another string to your bow. I’m just going to segue slightly. I think Pocket Cast does a pretty good job of doing things like HLS video. I could be wrong about that, but I’ve got a feeling it does.

[00:26:35] Rob Pugh: They even hook up with your Apple TV now, so you can watch and listen and yeah.

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so this is really clever and completely out of the realms of possibility just a year ago. So you could be listening on your headphones whilst you’re out walking the dog on your podcast player, so you’re only listening to audio. And you come back in, put your Apple TV on, turn on the Pocket Cast player, and it will seamlessly drop you right in the video at the exact moment where you finished the dog walk. It’s so clever and so neat. I love all that stuff.

[00:27:08] Rob Pugh: The future is so cool.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:10] Rob Pugh: I love it.

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So Tony, how do we switch it on? Is it genuinely one toggle in the Jetpack settings, or is there a little bit more to be set up?

[00:27:17] Tony: Yeah, more or less. There is one toggle to turn the module on. And then once it’s on, you go to Jetpack and click on the podcast option, and then from there, there should just be one button that is to set up your show.

And all it really requires is you either creating a new category or selecting a category. And this is, as we were talking about before, the category feed that is going to be taken over from there. And then you technically are done. But it’s advised that you fill out all of the other base settings, and we walk you through all of the ones that are required by the podcast show apps, to make sure that you don’t get blocked by Apple or Spotify for not having the necessary settings.

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: If I’ve been a podcaster for a number of years and I’ve got, I don’t know, a back catalog of 100 episodes or something like that. How do we handle that? How do we bring in previous episodes? And is there like an automated way of doing that or do I have to go and refigure 100 brand new pages on my WordPress website?

Is there any heavy lifting done there? Let’s just deal with the audio first, just the RSS feed and the audio. Is it a simple case of dropping the old podcast RSS feed in and you’ll capture all that audio and it’ll be on the Jetpack side of things? Let’s do that first.

[00:28:28] Tony: That’s a great question. I am not super familiar with the Core WordPress importer, but I believe that if there is a valid RSS feed with the normal RSS style tags, like enclosure and things like that, you should be able to import your RSS feed. Depending on how it’s configured on your current host, directly into WordPress. I’m not too sure what that would result in exactly. Especially because there’s a lot of different hosts out there, and it’s not like there’s one standard format for exporting your content. But yeah, that should get you part of the way there.

Then I think in the future, we’re really looking to start targeting some of the major current podcast hosts to be able to configure a migration flow to be able to come from those places to ours, in a more seamless way, albeit whatever sort of export they can give you or, whatnot. But I think that’s still on the horizon.

[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’d be really nice to, let’s say I have 100 episodes and I’ve got, it’s over on whatever, hosting platform X over there, for my podcast audio feed. It’d be nice to be able to just suck in all the descriptions, and all the titles and have them be created as WordPress posts with the category assigned. So that essentially my WordPress site with the click of a button and the wait of an hour has suddenly got 100 posts of the podcast type all ready to go. And then, that’ll sit inside my SEO sitemap and all of that kind of stuff. That would be really interesting to be able to do, I think.

[00:29:58] Rob Pugh: Yeah, I think we will try and have that in the future. We usually do try and make importing, especially from closed platforms, super easy. An example, another Substack. We have an amazing Substack importer. They’re not a big podcaster yet, but they, do have some, and we can look at adding that. But if you have all of your newsletter on Substack, you click a button and we bring over your whole, build you a website, bring over all your posts, all your subscribers, even paid subscribers. We seamlessly transfer it to the Stripe account. Everything we’re building, we’re just trying to make it super easy for people to own your data, go wherever you want. We encourage movement in and out, wherever you want to go, it’s up to you.

[00:30:31] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose that then leads me to this question, which is, and you’ve probably just answered it. You’re not holding people behind some sort of paywall here. If people try Jetpack Podcasts out and they decide, “You know what? I really want to go the other direction. I want to maybe go back to where I was, or just move to a new host,” or what have you. You’re not holding any of that hostage, are you? You can take it and run with it and put it somewhere else?

[00:30:52] Rob Pugh: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely not. Like that’s the, I think, one of the fundamentals of WordPress. You should be able to move within WordPress and out as much as you want. I will say that this is a new feature that me and Tony have built. Just because something doesn’t exist in a super streamlined way, doesn’t mean it’s our intention to lock you in. So please reach out and we’ll happily help you migrate off if that’s your wish.

[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: So I’ll just let you know, dear listener, that there’s several URLs which rather than read them, because in many cases they can be quite long. But one of them, which is really easy for me to say, I might as well do that one, is wordpress.com/podcast. That’s probably the easiest one. Oh, and maybe this one as well, jetpack.com/support/jetpack-podcast. There’s several more.

[00:31:38] Rob Pugh: Let me jump in. Let me sorry, Because as of two days ago, we now have jetpack.com/podcast.

[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That’s way better.

[00:31:46] Rob Pugh: We just relaunched the entire jetpack.com site, which is cool. You should go check it out. Yeah, so.

[00:31:51] Nathan Wrigley: Again though, that, so what was that? Jetpack.com/podcast is kind of the home for all of those bits and pieces.

[00:31:56] Rob Pugh: Yep, exactly.

[00:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, go there. That’s where you’re going to find all of the bits and pieces and I presume, when things are, adapted and modified.

[00:32:03] Rob Pugh: Yeah, the way to think about it’s still for some people confusing about Jetpack. So if you would like a website, the best WordPress hosting, then go to wordpress.com/podcast, and we’ll host your podcast for you. And if you want to host somewhere else, that’s great. Go host your WordPress site somewhere else, then go to jetpack.com/podcast and we’ll get you all set up as well.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you Rob, and thank you, Tony. Thanks so much for chatting to me, both of you.

[00:32:28] Rob Pugh: Yeah. Thank you Nathan.

[00:32:28] Tony: Yep, thank you.