PodBean.com Review
November 2, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzThe following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, you can purchase a review from me through PayPerPost by clicking on the PayPerPost Direct button located at the top left of my blog.
What is Podcasting?
I was a bit apprehensive when first accepting this review, as I knew absolutely nothing about podcasting; I wasn’t even exactly sure just what podcasting was.
So naturally, I had to do a bit of research on podcasting before even starting to take a look at their site.
For those of you out there who are as clueless as me, here are two sites that do a pretty good job of explaining what podcasting is:
Here’s a good description taken from the first link:
"Podcasting is delivering audio content to iPods and other portable media players on demand, so that it can be listened to at the user’s convenience. The main benefit of podcasting is that listeners can sync content to their media player and take it with them to listen whenever they want to. Because podcasts are typically saved in MP3 format, they can also be listened to on nearly any computer."
What is PodBean?
PodBean.com is a podcast hosting website and service that offers a plethora of features.
There are so many features, in fact, that in order to keep this review to a realistic length I will only be able to mention some of them.
PodBean.com is built for both podcast publishers podcast audiences. Whether you host your own weekly podcast, are a podcast freak and subscribe to multiple feeds, or do a bit of both, PodBean should be able to fulfill your needs and then some.
Podcast Subscribers:
Manage All Your Podcasts Subscriptions in One Place
With PodBean, you can manage all of your podcast subscriptions in one place, allowing you to access the same subscriptions and manage your account from any computer in the world.
Organize Your Subscriptions Through Tagging and Groups
PodBean offers a flexible podcast management system whereby you can organize all your subscriptions easily. Their tagging system allows for cross-referencing, and their groups feature lets you easily organize all your feeds.
Social Podcasting
PodBean.com, in addition to everything else it offers, also functions as a social networking site akin to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.
By viewing other member’s profiles, you can discover new and related podcasts from other members who have the same taste as you.
You can also browse and search millions of original MP3’s and videos created by the PodBean community.
Podcast Publishers:
Unlimited Bandwidth & Huge Storage
While PodBean’s service is certainly free to use, for only $4 a month you can upgrade your account and gain unmetered, unrestricted bandwidth.
This is invaluable if you host a popular podcast or are concerned about those expensive bandwidth overage charges your webhost inflicts on you.
Powerful Podcast Publishing Tools
Built upon and integrated into the WordPress CMS, PodBean.com offers powerful yet simple access to creating and managing podcasts.
Their professional-grade podcasting tools feature powerful audio/video uploading (including FTP access), publishing, managing and promoting.
Gorgeous and customizable themes
Another advantage to integrating the WordPress CMS into their site is the ease of theme management.
Switching themes takes literally seconds, and customizing them is as easy as doing do with WordPress.
There are dozens of themes already available and built-in to PodBean, ranging from professional to fun.
Podcast Statistics
Statistics are vitally important to monitor the effects and growth of any medium.
PodBean lets you monitor your podcast growth trends and view stats based on different criteria such as geolocation.
Monetize your Podcast
PodBean offers several methods of monetizing podcasts including selling products within feeds.
If you upgrade your account (starting at $4 a month), you can even offer paid subscriptions to your podcasts, which is all easily automated through PodBean
Sophisticated public and private sharing
PodBean’s private sharing feature allows you to easily password-protect your podcasts.
Podbean’s password protected feed is a unique way for you to protect your feed from public.
This works even if you link your podcast or MP3 file on your personal blog or social networking site like MySpace.
Seamless integration with your own site
My favourite feature that PodBean offers is their Auto-Generated Embed Code.
With it, you can simply copy and paste the HTML snippet into your blog (or YouTube, FaceBook, etc.)and it will create a little player with your streamed MP3, playlist, or latest podcast feed.
I’m glad I found a place to do this, because I’ve had instances in the past where I spent hours looking for such a device to stream my MP3 on my blog with no plugins other than Flash.
What’s even better is that you can upload your MP3 to PodBean.com and have them host it and handle the bandwidth as well. What more could you ask for?
For this reason alone, I’ll definitely be using PodBean again in the future the next time I host an MP3.
Here’s the player in action, loaded with the "We All Love Tyler Cruz" rap:
Pricing
PodBean offers five levels of membership: basic (free), basic plus, advanced, professional, and premium.
Their prices are more than affordable; you can get unlimited podcasting bandwidth and unlimited storage space for only $50 a year.
A full chart listing all the package details can be found here.
Get one month free paid service
If you sign up to PodBean through my bonus code: dHlsZXJjcnV6, you will get one month free of any Podbean paid service.
the song we all love tyler cruz is awesome, you did it yourself ?
Nope, search my blog for “RapForums.com”
Nice review, I’m suprised you weren’t familiar with Podcasting already!
Was also nice to see Duke Ellington in the screenshot 😀
This was hardly a review. It was just an ad for the what podbean offers without any critical insights. If you sign up for free as a podcaster, does podbean provide adequate space to podcast on a regular basis. I see the numbers infront of me on their website (that you reiterated here), but without any prior experience it is difficult to know what to look for. Let’s face it, a good review will offer both the good and bad. All I see here is the exact same information offered on the podbean website. I am skeptical about this being an actual review versus just another paid advertisement despite your disclaimer.
I’ve had a site with Podbean for several years. I’m very happy with the service. My site showcases the broadcast news writing program I developed during my teaching career. I record audio entries but more often simply write a blog there. The flexibility of the site’s delivery makes it a perfect platform for a variety of audio (and now video) postings. Give it a try.
[…] I only scratched the surface of its many uses I found a review written on https://www.tylercruz.com/podbeancom-review/ that really breaks down all the components. There are so many features of this site I would like […]
[…] for “free podcast hosting.” I cannot comment on the permanence of the site. There’s a review here. Perhaps because it was a paid review, it is more informational than it is evaluative. The comments […]
I am a Podbean customer and although the pricing and features are decent, there is NO acceptable level of customer support. The site crashes all too frequently, and you can’t get in touch with anyone on a timely basis. So it is both a bargain and a case of getting what you pay for.
I’m actually doing an assignment about Podbean right now, and i’m struggling to find out who created the website. Do you have any idea who developed it or when it was developed?
Why not contact them?
This company is a fraud, offered free 30-day trial for business account but charged our paypal immediately after subscribed. we tried to contact them and got no reply. finally we decided dispute the charge and they reply it’s paypal’s fault so they won’t refund it…. huh? Paypal ddin’t do much help either cuz they don’t protect “intangible purchase”. So don’t use Paypal to buy intangible goods and stay away from podbean forever.
I had a free podbean account for years and one day they decided to mark it as spam and delete all my content without even contacting me. They would not say why it was marked as spam or why they didn’t contact me before hand. Their customer service is awful and they don’t care. Do not use Podbean.com, even the free account!
Podbean is a terrible, terrible company, I regret ever starting my podcast there, and since they hold your RSS feed hostage, if you do decide to leave this horrible company, you have to start over with a new RSS feed, losing your subscribers and position in iTunes. Their statistics system is completely broken and worthless. Large blocks of “downloads” suddenly show up months later – Originally my download statistics for a block of three months: July, August, and September 2011 (early on in my podcast) were 820, 1100, 1224. Now it shows 820, 6100, 1224. Obviously a problem. When I sent them a message about it (they don’t have a phone number, but English is their second language at best anyway), they didn’t even directly address my comment. Then for december they show that I had 80,000 downloads! I WISH I had 80,000 downloads. And even though I’m a paying customer with “unmetered bandwidth” they tell me that my activity in december was 3.2 TERRABYTES of downloads and they will have to throttle my downloads now. Two months ago I had 7300 downloads. January I had 7400. Downloads don’t increase 10x and then just go back to normal, and the individual podcast pages where episode downloads are listed don’t show any jump in download activity. I’ve been emailing podbean for months about the problems with their broken stats, but if you send them a message you have about a 25% chance of them actually responding, but if they do responid at all, there will be a 90% chance that they will not actually address what you are emailing them about. Not to mention their site will randomly go down with no explanation, or it will suddenly go down with a “down for maintenance” message, but in 2 years they have NEVER proactively let us know that the site will be going down or estimate when it will be back up. DO NOT GO WITH PODBEAN, YOU WILL REGRET IT.
If not Podbean…then who???
Thanks for another wonderful article. Where else may just anyone get that type of information in such a perfect way
of writing? I have a presentation subsequent week,
and I am on the look for such information.