Meet Podcast X-Ray
Most days, I need to quickly get up to speed on a podcast I’ve never heard before. I need a quick, at-a-glance summary of things like:
Basic show information: Which language is spoken? Is the show episodic or serial? Which categories is the show listed in?
Publishing trends: when was the show first created? Is it still active? How deep is the back catalog? How consistently are new episodes published?
Contact information: Does the show have a website? Is an email address listed in its RSS feed?
Monetization: Is the show free to listen? Does it offer a paid subscription?
Technical details: Where are media files hosted? Which analytics prefixes appear in the feed? Is the show’s RSS feed valid?
Episode breakdown: Does the show contain a trailer? How long are episodes, on average? How many bonus episodes are published?
A while back, in an attempt to answer these types of questions, I built a small tool for myself. I called it “Podcast X-Ray.” “Podcast” because, well, podcasts. And “X-Ray” because it’s designed to reveal details many podcast listening apps don’t show.
Eventually, I shared a link to Podcast X-Ray with my colleagues, and then it became an internal Bumper tool, available only to our team and clients. For nearly a year and a half, Podcast X-Ray ran quietly on a tiny server with a very small handful of users.
Pretty soon we realized that Podcast X-Ray might be useful to other people, too – people who don’t work at Bumper. So we enlisted the help of Stephen Hallgren (now Bumper’s fractional CTO) to significantly expand Podcast X-Ray’s capabilities, and get it ready for more people to use.
Simple, free, and available to everyone
Today, we’re excited to share Podcast X-Ray with the entire podcast community. It’s simple, it’s free, and it makes common podcast research questions a little bit easier to answer.
What sorts of things can Podcast X-Ray let you see? Look up The Daily, and it becomes obvious when the show started to release Sunday episodes:
Check out The Daily Aus, and you’ll see how the show publishes like clockwork:
Look up All Ears English, and see that most episodes run between 17–20 minutes:
And there’s much more.
Need high-resolution podcast artwork? Podcast X-Ray links to it. Want to see if a show’s author included their email address in their RSS feed? There’s a button for that.
Here at Bumper, we use Podcast X-Ray every day. We hope it’s useful to you, too.