Added ‘Say Hello to Black Jack’ to every podcast directory I could find. Maybe thirty total? That’s a day’s work unto itself. The first couple of hours were spent dealing with iHeartRadio, Stitcher, and TuneIn. Well worth my time. By the time I got to hour four, however, I was scraping through potentially dead servers to add my podcast to a sea of forgotten links.
One helpful resource was a page on podcast411 that listed all the live podcasts that the blogist knew about. The list was last updated in 2016. Even then, half of the forty-five links were dead. Beneath the live links were another 150 dead links, originally listed when the page was first created in 2004, and subsequently moved to the end of the list when their pages was no longer active.
The Internet has changed considerably in the past thirteen years. I get that. I still can’t help but wonder why so many of these cites were started, and ultimately failed. My best guess is that creating a form to add podcasts to a directory is relatively ‘easy’, but maintaining a website with tens of thousands of links is considerably more difficult. I’m sure for many of these cites, it simply wasn’t worth the hassle. Especially considering the least popular cites probably received less web traffic from podcast listeners, and more from podcast creators like me, who were plumbing the depths of the Internet to certify their show appeared on every conceivable list.