I Tracked 10k Top Podcasts: Here's Who Hosts Their Feeds

Nov 3, 2025

On this page

• Results
• Feed hosts — Top 1,000 shows
• Feed hosts — Top 10,000 shows
• My Key Takeaways
• Methodology (My Detective Work)
• Examples (So You Can Double-Check Me)
• Straight-shot mappings
• Proxy or analytics relay, but still clear
• Needed the enclosure sniff
• What's next

While working on my last two posts on how often big shows publish and how long their episodes run, I had to look at thousands of RSS feeds. I started noticing some patterns in the URLs and got curious: who actually hosts the top podcasts?

So, I decided to do a much more formal analysis to figure out this question: who are the hosting providers for all these top shows?

The results were pretty surprising. In this post, I'll show you:

• The hosting data for the top 1,000 and top 10,000 shows.
• The key patterns that stood out to me.
• The methodology I used, which got interesting because I found some quirks in how these feeds are structured.

Results

Feed hosts — Top 1,000 shows

Feed hosts — Top 10,000 shows

Each donut keeps the largest platforms separate and bundles the rest so you can see the split at a glance.

My Key Takeaways

• Megaphone's "Invisible" Dominance. I was surprised by Megaphone's dominance at the top (28.9% of the 1k cohort), especially since Libsyn and Buzzsprout are bigger names in the indie space. But the real story is in the audio delivery. When I did what I call an "enclosure sniff" on shows that look self-hosted (like NPR's), I found that Megaphone was still the one serving the actual mp3s. They're the invisible engine for a huge chunk of the top tier. My best guess is this all comes down to dynamic ad insertion, which is table stakes for enterprise publishers.

• The "Graduation" Story. Looking at the top 10k, Libsyn is a giant (14.5%), but its share is cut in half in the top 1k (7.7%). Meanwhile, enterprise players like Omny and ART19 see their shares double. This looks like a classic graduation story. Shows start on the fantastic, indie-friendly hosts, but once they become commercial powerhouses, they seem to 'graduate' to the enterprise stack to get more advanced ad tech.

• The Clever Strategy of Self-Hosting. I was surprised to see that about 1 in 10 of the biggest shows still host their own RSS feeds. At first, it felt like a throwback. But when I dug in, I realized it's actually a super smart strategy. Many of these 'self-hosted' feeds are just a branded URL (like feeds.npr.org). The real work (delivering the audio and inserting ads) is still handled by Megaphone on the backend. It's the best of both worlds: you get full control over your brand, but you still get to use enterprise-grade ad tech.

• Spotify/Anchor's Disappearing Act. Given how many new shows start on Anchor, I expected to see more of them in the top 1k. But their share just craters at the very top. My theory? Anchor is an amazing, frictionless launchpad. It’s probably the best place to start. But once a show gets serious traction and wants to tap into the broader ad market beyond Spotify's walls, it seems they often pack their bags for a host with more flexible monetization.

Methodology (My Detective Work)

My methodology had a few layers to get the real story.

1. First, I did the easy part: classifying feeds from obvious URLs like feeds.simplecast.com.
2. But for the tricky ones (custom domains or weird URLs), I did what I call an "enclosure sniff." I peeked inside the RSS file to find the URL for the actual audio file. This let me separate the brand (the RSS feed) from the engine (the audio delivery platform).
3. For the charts you see, I also intentionally "clubbed" some categories like self-hosted sites and old feed managers into 'Other' so you can see the market share of the major commercial platforms more clearly.

Examples (So You Can Double-Check Me)

Straight-shot mappings

• https: → Simplecast
• https: → Megaphone
• https: → Omny
• https: → ART19
• https: → Libsyn

Proxy or analytics relay, but still clear

• https: → Megaphone
• https: → Acast
• https: → Omny
• https: → First-party RSS (NBC News)
• https: → First-party RSS (APM)

Needed the enclosure sniff

• Quick refresher: the <enclosure> tag in an RSS feed points to the actual media file, so the host that serves it tells us who delivers the audio.

• https: → First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone

• https: → First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone

• https: → First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone

• https: → First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone

• https: → First-party RSS; enclosure points to Megaphone

What's next

This data opened up a lot of new questions for me. I'm not sure what I'll dig into next—maybe cross-referencing hosting with episode length, or maybe something else entirely. The deeper I go, the more interesting the patterns get.

If you have any interesting ideas or see something I missed, hit me up.