Changing the subdomain

If the subdomain is changed after a podcast is published, all feed addresses will change as well. Without setting up proper redirection of the old feed, you are going to lose the entire audience that subscribed to the podcast in one fell swoop.

Redirecting the old RSS feed address to the new feed address

To avoid losing all your subscribers at once, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Create a new podcast. This serves as a dummy podcast that gets the old feed address and is only there to point to the new podcast.
  2. The dummy podcast now needs one more published episode to be released. This episode can simply contain 30 seconds of background noise. Nobody should listen to this episode, because every call of the old feed should be redirected directly to the new one.
  3. Publish the dummy podcast afterwards.
  4. For the original podcast, you now change the subdomain to the value of the new, desired subdomain.
  5. You now assign the old subdomain to the dummy podcast.
  6. Last but not least, you need to set up the redirects in the dummy podcast so that the old feed redirects to the correct podcast. To do this, fill in all the corresponding fields with the new feed URLs in the "More options" tab in the settings of the dummy podcast.

Note: Make sure that not only the field for the `<itunes:new-feed-url>` is filled, but also the fields for the different formats. Please be careful not to include spaces when copying & pasting.

Set up redirects for a podcast

After setting up these redirections, all accesses to the old subdomain and old feed URL are immediately forwarded to the new feed URLs and subdomain. This redirection should last 4-5 weeks, after that the dummy podcast can be completely deleted again.

Detection of redirects through other platforms

Unfortunately, not all platforms currently recognize an established redirection. For these platforms, the update of the feed can only be done manually, which in most cases is done with a support ticket at the respective service. To do this, simply write to the respective platform. The following platforms, which are currently supported by us directly, currently recognize feed forwarding:

  • Amazon
  • Apple
  • Deezer
  • Google Podcasts
  • Spotify

Impacts on the web player

If you embed the web player on your own website, it is still necessary to adjust the embed codes. This usually requires an adjustment in the `data-configuration` attribute, whereby the old subdomain is replaced with the new subdomain. Since there is no redirection in the player, it is recommended to change the subdomain including the above steps and to adjust the embed codes in short intervals. Otherwise, the embedded player will display no data or incorrect data, as it now accesses and displays the episodes of the dummy podcast.