The 5 Best Chartable Replacements

In our search for the best replacements for Chartable, we're shedding light on some promising contenders! From the free Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) offering detailed analytics to Podgagement and Podstatus for tracking ratings and reviews, there's something for everyone. We also dive into PodTrack's professional features tailored for those seeking robust demographic surveys and Apple's innovative integration with Linkfire for smart link tracking.

Our recommendations:

• OP3 
• Podgagement 
• Podstatus
• Podtrac 
• Linkfire for Podcasts 

Don't forget to send us Fan Mail telling us about a podcast episode that is so undeniably good you could recommend it to anyone! 

Chapters

• 0:50 Chartable Shutdown & Alternatives
• 11:56 Get Pocketcasts Free for 1 Year!
• 13:46 Send in Your Sound-Off Response

Transcript

Alban: 0:00

Hola Jordan.

Jordan: 0:01

Hola Alban, Como estas.

Alban: 0:04

Welcome back. You were just on a trip. You've been gone for a little bit. Where did you go?

Jordan: 0:08

I went to Jalisco, Mexico, for my 10th wedding anniversary.

Alban: 0:13

Wow, I know Congratulations.

Jordan: 0:16

Thank you, congratulations to you too. It sounds like you and I got married within like a week of each other.

Alban: 0:21

Yeah, mine is a week from now.

Jordan: 0:23

Oh, it's a week from now, so two weeks, so like a week of each other.

Alban: 0:25

Yeah, mine is a week from now. Oh, it's a week from now, so two weeks. So we're just after you. That's wild, all right.

Jordan: 0:30

So you're back.

Alban: 0:31

You're well rested.

Jordan: 0:32

You have a tan? Yeah, you're ready to go. I don't. I don't know if I would say I was well rested Um Mexico is a bit of a party, so. I don't think I'm well rested, but I definitely had a lot of fun, so I'm funned out. So now I'm ready to just chill at home.

Alban: 0:53

The party has ended, not just for you coming back, but the party has ended over at Chartable. Looks like. Chartable is being shut down and we are starting to get a lot of questions about it, so I started digging into this. You use Chartable what was Chartable even for.

Jordan: 1:09

So many different things. I think a lot of people think that Chartable was just like you know, ratings and reviews, like it was a place to see all your ratings and reviews, but it was actually more than that. They would be able to sort of like aggregate your stats and show it to like advertisers If you had like certain links. They also had like smart links and smart promos that I would use with sponsors. They would actually create a smart link in Chartable and then like tie my Chartable account to it and be able to track the progress of like an ad campaign or something like that. So it actually did a lot and so, and also rankings like it would notify you of like rankings of your podcast in certain places. Yeah, so it's kind of a hard thing to lose in the podcasting space just because it did do so much.

Alban: 2:01

Yeah, they did a great job of pulling. All these kind of things were public. You know you could go and look on the rankings every day if you wanted and see as my podcast moved up or down.

Alban: 2:16

But I remember when it first started looking and seeing Buzzcast and I was like, oh, I didn't know that we were charting in some of these countries that you know weren't the US, so I never saw them myself. It was nice to see. It's a bummer to see it shut down. I'll be honest, it kind of does make sense. Spotify bought it because they wanted all the ad tech piece of it and the part of it that was a little bit more focused on the indie creators, like hey, see when you're charting or see when you get a new rating or review. That probably didn't fit perfectly into what Spotify's goals for charcoal were.

Jordan: 2:49

Yeah, definitely, and I mean it really was nice because you know when you see a rating review for a country that you're not in, you have to. I know an Apple podcast. You have to physically go and click like the countries to see if you have reviews in them. Like this is such a big flaw with Apple. I love Apple, but this is just so cumbersome because you have to like literally click through like 200 countries and just be like do I have a review here? Do I have a review here? And so that was another benefit of Chartable for podcasters. Was it like would pull reviews that you know from Sweden or something if you didn't know that you had it so?

Alban: 3:27

right, and that totally makes sense, cause if you're in Germany and you're looking and, like, the number one says like hey, this, by the way, isn't in German, it's in English, then that is a rating or review that really is applicable to people who are in Germany, speaking German. Um, but for the podcaster you know it is, you don't feel like clicking through. You're like I only have two US based ones. I don't know if I really want to click through every few days to check, like, did I get one in Pakistan yet? Nope, all right, check back in a week.

Jordan: 3:58

Yeah, you basically just have to like look at your buzzsprout stats and figure out what countries you're most popular in and then just kind of like narrow it down that way, Just hope for the best.

Alban: 4:08

So what's the timeline for Chartable? When is everything being shut down and what do we lose when?

Jordan: 4:13

It's pretty fast actually. So I mean, they made the announcement and they're like effective immediately. No podcasters can sign up for Chartable anymore. And then they said that Chartable will officially shut down, like it'll officially be integrated into Megaphone on December 12th, so you have, like what is that?

Alban: 4:33

Two months.

Jordan: 4:34

Yeah, so it's really fast. They're telling podcasters like hey, you need to remove the Chartable prefix from your RSS feed prior to December 12th because once they shut that down it could create like a disruption in like serving your podcast episodes.

Alban: 4:49

Yeah Well, I can say with confidence the way we'll handle that is I think we'll just remove all charitable links before they all start breaking.

Jordan: 4:57

Yeah.

Alban: 4:58

I'll need to send an email to everybody saying hey, we're going, you know they're shutting it down. We're going to remove them sometime before that December 12th date. We just need to figure out when and make it easy for everybody. But it is a bummer to lose the functionality. So I know you did a little bit of research on some alternatives.

Jordan: 5:16

Yeah.

Alban: 5:16

And-. It can be a little bit hard, because each of these alternatives does different things and they cover a different part of what Chartable did. So can you walk us through what you found?

Jordan: 5:26

Yeah, so it was. I think one of the more difficult things for people is going to be finding free options to replace, like some of the Chartable functionality. I mean, obviously, the first one that we have is OP3, the Open Podcast Prefix Project. They're free.

Alban: 5:43

Shout out to John Spurlock, friend of the show.

Jordan: 5:45

And they have a public stats page where you can see your downloads, the audience members, episode pacing, top countries, apps, devices, things like that and it is nice because it is a way for you to share that with advertisers or potential partners, way for you to share that with, like advertisers or potential partners and or guests and say like, hey, here's how my episode performs and they can see that information and they know it's valid. Um and so they also have public spreadsheet data exports, which I didn't realize that they had that too. So if an advertiser is working with you and they want to, you know, see how episodes are performing, they can actually export that to a spreadsheet for themselves.

Alban: 6:24

All right. So if you want to do the ratings or reviews and kind of that social proof stuff, what should we be looking at?

Jordan: 6:30

Ratings or reviews are a little bit trickier and I don't think you're going to find a free option for this. I did a lot of digging. I tried doing it because you know I love a good bootstrap project, but there are some really, really great services that you can use that offer more than just ratings and reviews. The first is Podgagement. It's a really great service. They track ratings and reviews. They also help you to create social proof in reviews, like image makers, so if you get a good review or something like that, you can generate an image to share on social media. Um, they also have audience feedback tools, which is really cool. We love that. And then chart and SEO tracking is coming soon. They said so. Hopefully that does come soon, Cause that would be really cool.

Alban: 7:16

And chart and SEO tracking. That's like, oh, you're moving up the charts in Pakistan, kind of thing.

Jordan: 7:26

Yeah, and probably, like you know how your podcast is ranking in the search engines or you know it'd be. I don't know if they do SEO tracking in podcast apps, because it does behave so differently from, you know, google, but that would be really cool too. I don't want to like assume that they're doing that, but it would be cool.

Alban: 7:43

And this is Daniel J Lewis's project from the Audacity podcast. So, Daniel, if you're listening, there's some a feature request from Jordan. What was the other ones that you found?

Jordan: 7:51

The other ones I found. So there's pod status, which is actually like very similar to pod gaugement. So it might be, you know, like looking at the services, seeing their pricing, which I actually I think the pricing is very similar. So, um, it might just be like which company you vibe with most or you like the um UI most, or whatever. But they also do reviews and you can share reviews and then chart analytics for Apple, spotify and iVoox. I don't know what that's through. I haven't actually heard of iVoox.

Alban: 8:20

I think iVoox is just another podcast directory. Yeah, that's much more popular overseas, but I'm not exactly sure what's country, so probably more important for people who might be outside the US.

Jordan: 8:32

Yeah, and then they also have rank monitoring for daily performance of your podcast.

Jordan: 8:37

So that's a really cool one. Another one that I came across is PodTrack, and I have also. I haven't worked with PodTrack. I haven't created an account with PodTrack. However, advertisers that I work with have actually sent me. They use PodTrack and they sent me the link as a prefix for when I fulfill sponsorships or things like that, so I am familiar with it. I don't know how good it is for, like the indie podcaster, but maybe if you're doing something a little bit more professional, I know that they don't just work with advertisers, it's also podcasters. So they share like stats and metrics and then they have a demographic survey. I don't know what that means as far as like demographic survey, unless they pull the information from like Spotify or something Um. As far as like demographic survey unless they pull the information from like Spotify or something.

Alban: 9:22

Demographic survey, I mean, is that like maybe, hey, tell us if you're a man or a woman, or tell us about your demographics?

Jordan: 9:29

It could just be like a true survey. But how do they serve that to your listeners, right Like it's? It's just kind of I don't know, it's weird. And then um episode comparisons and rankings as well.

Alban: 9:37

So maybe what if I could try to summarize a little bit of this if you want really nice stats on top of what you're already getting from your podcast host, then maybe you're looking at OP3. If you're looking for ratings and reviews from Apple Podcasts or Spotify, maybe you want to track your rankings. Then pod status or pod gaugement look like what you should be checking party much more analytics focused.

Alban: 10:15

Probably that you're working with an advertiser. Maybe you are an advertiser and you want some sort of validation. A pod track might end up being where you go. Is that kind of a good summary?

Jordan: 10:23

yeah, I think that's a really great summary. And then, um, the final role to fill with chartable is their smart links and smart promos, and so I remembered that back in 2023, apple Podcasts actually made an announcement that they had integrated with Linkfire. Do you remember this album?

Alban: 10:39

I remember hearing it, though I don't even know what Linkfire is, so I so I mean it's actually really cool.

Jordan: 10:46

I guess it's more popular with, like musicians and or entertainment will use Linkfire and it kind of reminds me of link tree, where you get a landing page with like a bio and you know your podcast info and like different pages that you can send people to and then, at the same time, they actually give you like deeper tracking analytics for your campaign. So if you do like a social post and you link to your link fire landing page because of their integration with Apple, you can see like how many people click through and then, when they click through, if they listen to the podcast on Apple or if they follow your podcast on Apple super cool. So that's actually a really great way to, you know, test out your marketing and see how that's performing, and I think that this is what's most similar to smart links.

Alban: 11:35

Okay, so link fire. If you're looking for that kind of smart length thing, that's probably sounds like maybe the best solution. If you want something like a link tree that links out to every one of your directories, the best solution if you're on Buzzsprout would be that Buzzsprout website follow page recently redesigned and talked about it in the last episode, so check it out. I am really excited about an update on pocket casts.

Jordan: 12:02

Man, they're just like busy. What's going on with pocket casts now?

Alban: 12:05

Well, I've been using it for a while. It's the app I'm using all the time now to listen to podcasts and then, probably the day after we recorded our last episode, they launched support for podcast transcripts. So this is something we worked on years ago and we started adding podcast transcripts to RSS feeds and Pocket Cast now supports them. So we probably should talk more in depth, especially when we get Kevin back next week and we have a bit more of an in-depth conversation about transcripts. But they support transcripts now, which is really cool. And if you haven't already tried Pocket Cast, I spotted a link in pod news a few weeks ago it was on September 25th and you can get a free year of Pocket Cast Plus for anybody who clicks that link. So if you want to try Pocket Cast, go find that September 25th episode of Pod News and click the link and get a free year and see if you enjoy it, if it might replace the app that you're using right now to listen to podcasts.

Alban: 13:12

Wow, that's so cool Read some transcripts while you're at it.

Jordan: 13:14

Like a free year. That's a pretty big deal, so that's awesome.

Alban: 13:18

Yeah, Right after I like signed up to pay for a year, they're like we're offering a free year.

Jordan: 13:24

I think you and Kevin just like bankrolled it enough that they're like all right, we can let some people in.

Alban: 13:44

I went for the normal plan. I think Kevin's on the like.

Jordan: 13:46

Inaugural founder member like the founding fathers edition or something he's on some another level. But, yeah, I think it's just like you get undying gratitude from the pocket cast team. Okay, and then we also need to remind people to send in their submissions for last episode's sound off question. So, alvin, what was that again?

Alban: 13:56

Oh yeah, I've been left hanging on this. Oh man, what are your favorite podcast episodes? Like those individual episodes that always when you recommend them, people love them. We've gotten zero submissions.

Jordan: 14:10

No.

Alban: 14:11

This is going to be a segment of the show that I'm going to have to go find a bunch on my own or something.

Jordan: 14:16

I already found mine. I'm ready.

Alban: 14:18

Oh good, send it into the show Text, the link. Jordan, I've been waiting all week Like, oh, we'll listen to some of these, and we have not received one. We've gotten lots of feedback, lots of good feedback, lots of stuff about the show, but nothing about what are the best podcast episodes you've ever listened to. So if you have an answer to that, then send it in to us. We'd love to hear it.

Jordan: 14:41

Well, I'm really excited for our next episode of Buzzcast. So until then, everyone thanks for listening and keep podcasting.