Optimizing a Podcast for Apple Podcasts (Patreon)

Hey Everyone,

This is more of a blog post than a production update, intended to talk about our struggles optimizing our shows on Apple Podcasts. It's not entirely their fault, but it wasn't easy to reach the solutions. This post will hopefully showcase the work we do in the shadows to make a better experience for our listeners.

This is also intended as a heads-up to fellow creators who are may currently have the same issues (and might not be aware of it!). We also want to offer tips on how to get around these issues.

It's common knowledge that Apple has very specific hoops that they want creators to adhere to. They specify "if you want to be featured" that they prioritize shows with unique episode art. They explain in no uncertain terms what they want and don't want in an episode title. However, their own app does not adhere to these standards every time, and even our hosting platform makes updates that aren't clearly communicated: as a result we have been unknowingly delivering an inferior experience to Apple Podcast users for the last few years.

Here is what we've learned...

Episode Art

Show art is the artwork you see for a podcast as a 'show' - akin to the cover of a book.

Episode art is a unique RSS field for an individual episode of that show - like chapter art.

Show and Episode art have similar upload requirements

We have multiple podcasts that tell multiple stories in a single podcast feed. The Liberty Podcast showcases many stories all set within Atrius. Don't Mind investigates strange happenings from around the world. Each multi-episode story has "episode artwork" which is the same art across an entire story. This allows listeners to visually identify which story an episode belongs to at a glance.

Shows like Dark Dice have unique episode art for virtually every episode released. This is all but a prerequisite for being featured on Apple Podcasts.

It came as a surprise to us to learn that none of the unique artwork we had posted for years was showing up on Apple Podcasts.

To clarify, the "episode art" in question appears on other apps like Spotify/Podcast Addict but didn't populate on Apple Podcasts. That's the bug we encountered. Pretty terrible, eh? We uploaded at the correct specifications (square image, under 5mb, 3000x3000 PNG) and the episode art still did not populate. We emailed Apple Podcast support and they were unhelpful - more or less saying it was user error and that we must have uploaded it incorrectly.

We found a workaround: Upload episode art as a 2000x2000 JPG.This took about a week of trail and error. Art updates takes a day to populate. Dark Dice now has unique art for almost every episode and we just fixed Don't Mind Cruxmont - which should populate in about 24 hours.

Episode Titles

In keeping with the "easy listener experience" theme, we retitled all of our episodes for all of our shows in 2023. The biggest complaint we had from Dark Dice & Premium Patreon Feed fans was that our episode titles were confusing because they differed from show to show. For example:Critical Research :: Entry 007:: Greater GainsDark Dice: Chapter 2.16B: The Next Bad ThingDon't Mind: Cruxmont - Episode 5We adapted a new episode title system based on Patron/listener feedback and it's been a great improvement across all of our shows.

The new format for Don't Mind is visible on the top of the above screenshot... But despite changing the title for EVERY episode, some podcast episode titles were showing up incorrectly in Apple Podcasts (as of January, 2025). This issue, again, only affected Apple Podcasts so we did some investigating. The culprit, it turned out, was the "Clean Title" field.

Sidebar: Check Your "Clean Title Data" on Old ContentIn Q4 2024 the podcast hosting platforms Acast and Megaphone (both owned by Spotify) updated their podcast creator-facing interfaces. You may remember that this change unexpectedly killed our Premium Patreon RSS for a short time.

We were not notified before the update took place, but for the most part we appreciate the improvements on Megaphone... However, as you can see in the above screenshot, just below the "Episode Title" field - a new field was added to Megaphone called "Clean Title." Open Acast (originally different from "Acast" - but to avoid confusion let's not go there) had this field for years, so this was an unnoticed improvement for many creators.

Clean Title is a field used to enter an episode title without including season or episode information. That way "smarter" apps (like Apple) can show you content by season, with the episode number displayed above the name (see above), and the "clean" episode name doesn't get so long that it runs off your phone screen. It's a logical field for apps that allow sorting by season/episode number.

However, episodes that have been on Megaphone for years now updated the "Clean Title" field using old "episode title" data from our original upload date, not the current episode titles... This could be a "unique to us" problem, since we migrated to Megaphone, but is likely affecting other creators as well. We went through over 100 episodes and updated this field - so it should hit Apple within 24 hours.

Episode Descriptions

The descriptive text for each episode similarly has a hidden issue that creators should be aware of - a 4,000 character limit. While this doesn't seem like an issue, embedded hyperlinks are counted against this limit - meaning that you can quickly hit 4k characters if you have more than 5 links. Some podcast hosts (like Open Acast, as of 2024) do not inform you of this limit, and any data beyond 4k is simply cut off. Years ago, as newbie podcasters, we used to link each voice actor's website, but had to stop when we realized that doing this prevent listeners from seeing our full credits.

So, back on Apple Podcast, episode descriptions look terrible when viewed in a browser because they don't contain line breaks, italics, bold, or hyperlinks. The formatting and TLC put into episode descriptions are only visible in the app directly, so don't be scared if things look really off when you pull up your content in a browser.

Over the years we've changed our formatting for credits, but beyond refining ways to reduce the character count (so we can fully credit our team and include content warnings, etc), the overall character count limit is just something of which creators should be aware.

I hope that this has been interesting, or at least given you a peek into the hidden work that podcast creators do to ensure that listeners on ALL PLATFORMS have the same positive experience with our content.

So if you're a creator, just to recap:

Check your episode art

Check your Episode Titles

Check your Episode Descriptions

We hope you all have a great weekend, and that you know a bit more about podcasting than a few minutes ago!

-Cheers     Travis