I did my first poll to see how many patrons were using the RSS and how many were having trouble.
It was a real eye opener. It is really hard for patrons to figure out how to subscribe to their rss and on mobile really hard.
Any ideas on what has worked? This is an AWESOME feature (for our show it means ad free episodes and more) and I really want my patrons to be able to access this benefit in a way with low friction.
Thanks!!!
Great question, Drew!
Pinging podcasters I know of in the community to see if they have any ideas here.
@acedtect @jreinhart @shineboxmp @westeroshistory @tdepass @jody —anyone have anything to add regarding rss accessibility?
I’m in the lucky position of having a pretty tech savvy audience so I haven’t seen as much confusion, but there is some. I’ve just manually guiding folks through the process. There really isn’t a great way to get these personalized feeds into the silos that are podcast apps these days. That said aI love the implementation here and wouldn’t want to change it.
It’d be cool if there was some shortcut onboarding process in the patreon app the helped people easily cut and paste the link and gave them instructions on some of the most popular apps (Overcast, Pocketcasts, etc) of where to find where to paste it. Most of the apps recognize an rss feed on the clipboard and make it easy to add if you know where to go to manually add them.
We must teach listeners to podcast like it’s 2005! Perhaps play Hollaback Girl behind an instruction video.
Tom
Hey there.
We have had 7, 5 and 2 day advance release periods for our show since long before the private RSS feed was an option. We paid $10/month for pro-Dropbox and just give everyone the link to it on the appropriate day. (for videos, we make it “unlisted” on YouTube and share links with the appropriate patrons in the same manner as the podcasts).
To be honest, the private RSS feed doesn’t work for us. I don’t mean that based on how we do things… I mean it literally doesn’t work. We currently have an open support ticket with Patreon’s team to figure out why. Once we get it working we intend to move a lot of episodes to it, but we probably still won’t be able to do the early release through it. It’s going to need more functionality before it will work for us in that regard, though I am optimistic for the future.
For example, if we could make episodes in the RSS feed visible to certain patrons only (just like posts) that would be ideal.
Hey all, to clarify now, the private RSS feed now seems to be working great and it’s a wonderful benefit for us to have for our Patrons.