For Podcasters
How to claim, maintain and promote your show on Most Voted Podcasts
What it's about
Most Voted Podcasts is a community leaderboard: the order comes from listeners' votes, not from download numbers and not from advertising budgets. That means two things for you. You get visibility among people who are actively looking for good shows right now. And you can take charge of your own page here.
Your show may already be here
Our catalogue holds more than four thousand shows, and nobody has to submit one for it to be listed — just search for the name. If it's missing, any signed-in account can add it through the suggestion feature: we find it in a public podcast directory and take title, description, artwork and episodes from your RSS feed.
Being listed costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You don't have to do anything for it.
How to prove the show is yours
Three routes, and you only need one. Your show's page shows which ones are offered for it:
- Via the feed: place a verification code in your RSS feed. The cleanest route, because only someone with publishing access can do it.
- Via the website: the same code on the show's website.
- Via the email address in the feed: we send a confirmation mail to exactly the address listed in your feed — not to one somebody types in here.
We never contact you about this on our own initiative. A mail only goes out if you start that route yourself.
What you maintain afterwards — and what comes from the feed
Most of this lives in your feed, not with us. Title, publisher, description, artwork and episodes are read from your RSS feed; we reconcile it daily, so changes are usually here within a day. For those fields there is deliberately no form on our side — anything entered there would be overwritten at the next sync.
So your management area holds what your feed doesn't have: a note to your listeners that appears on the show page, and an overview of what we last read from the feed. The latter is more useful than it sounds — it shows you what other directories read out of your feed as well.
The widget for your own website
Every show has a widget that displays its current position and keeps itself up to date. You copy a snippet into your page, that's it. For awards there's a matching variant that names the award.
The monthly awards
Every month, each category is awarded: gold, silver, bronze, plus places four to ten as nominations. You don't have to apply — every listed show takes part, and only the votes cast during the voting period decide.
German and English run separately: German-language shows compete on the German pages, English-language ones on the English pages. We take your show's language from the declaration in your feed. If it's wrong there, fix it there — it reaches us at the next sync.
Winners stay visible in the award archive permanently, and there's material about the award for your own publicity.
The jury
Alongside the votes there are recommendations from an independent jury, written by people who listen for a living, and they also introduce little-known shows. Two things, openly: a jury recommendation cannot be bought, and it does not change the community ranking — jurors vote like everyone else. You can't nominate your show to the jury; it picks for itself.
Prominent placement
There are paid placements in the podcast lists: a show appears at a fixed, prominent spot, clearly marked as "Sponsored". It changes nothing about the ranking, and listeners can vote a sponsored show up or down as usual. Terms for podcasts aren't published yet — if this interests you, ask us through the contact form.
What isn't possible here
- Influencing votes. Each account votes once per show, accounts are confirmed by email, and unusual patterns are reviewed. There's no extra vote for you as the owner either.
- Removing negative votes. They stay visible. A leaderboard you can delete the rejection from isn't one.
- Overwriting feed fields here. See above — it would be gone at the next sync.
- Taking the show off the list because you don't like its position. If there's a real reason — a discontinued show, a legal problem — write to us.
Questions?
The most common answers are in the FAQ. Anything else through the contact form — there's a human on the other side.