{"id":4289,"date":"2026-02-23T18:15:49","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T18:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rss.com\/blog\/?p=4289"},"modified":"2026-04-24T11:48:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T11:48:50","slug":"the-history-of-rss-podcasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rss.com\/blog\/the-history-of-rss-podcasting\/","title":{"rendered":"The History of RSS.com"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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1st Version of RSS.com (January 29, 2018)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Imagine for a moment launching a business with a partner you\u2019ve never actually met in real life. Now imagine doing it as a passion project while maintaining a full-time job. That\u2019s exactly how the co-founders of our podcast hosting company started. Alberto Betella and Benjamin Richardson built and launched RSS.com from two different continents without meeting in person for three full years. Below is our company\u2019s origin story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/span>It All Started with an Idea \ud83d\udca1<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2005<\/b>, while Alberto was a student at the Italian University of Bergamo, he started working on a software that would allow teachers to share their classes as podcast episodes for students to listen to and refer back to. He decided to distribute his work using an open source license and call it Podcast Generator (PG)<\/a>, a web-based podcast publishing platform that allowed anyone in the world to download and use it.\u00a0After its launch in April of 2006<\/b>, a full year before the launch of iTunes U, hundreds of educational institutions, as well as organizations all over the world started to use PG.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Announcement of the launch of Podcast Generator on April 5, 2006 on SourceForge.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Alberto actively developed and maintained this free software on his own for more than 11 years, until 2017 circa. During that time, he received and responded to hundreds of support and feature requests which gave him insight into what podcasters really need. He was also realizing that PG could become much better and more powerful if it was moved to the cloud and offered at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first years following its launch, PG was downloaded more than half a million times, and still powers tens of thousands of active shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Since its launch, Podcast Generator was downloaded over half a million times and it powered an estimated 25,000 original podcasts worldwide, gathering a broad and diverse community of content creators and volunteers from all over the world, who also translated and localized this application into 59 languages.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/span>Meanwhile on the Other Side of the World …<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the 90s and 2000s, Ben was learning a lot about running a company. He started his first business, Aztex Sharpening in 1996 after seeing an older gentleman in the streets of Teramo, Italy sharpening a set of scissors.  Reality soon set in, however, when the neighbors in his South Texas neighborhood chose to sharpen their knives the old fashioned way (fancy old can-openers all came with a sharpening stone).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben’s next endeavor was a pressure washing business in South Texas that he grew and ultimately sold to focus on completing a business degree in entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben attended BYU during the middle of the dot com bubble. Of all the great things he learned in business school, two of particular note sunk in deeply: a fellow student had purchased an internet domain (windows.com) and sold it to Microsoft for a reported one million dollars; and concurrently, another student at the university had secured the rights to a phone number that he was using to sell contact lenses (1-800-Contacts). Inspired by his fellow students success, he started looking for a domain of his own to purchase and flip into a healthy profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A stroke of luck and serendipity struck when the domain RSS.com became available and Ben jumped at the opportunity to acquire it in June 2013<\/b>. At the time, Google Reader (the world’s largest RSS feed reader) was shutting down<\/a>, and as a result, was creating a new ecosystem of paid RSS feed readers. Ben rolled up his sleeves, and took on the challenge of finding a developer to help him build an RSS Feed Reader product on RSS.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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RSS Feed Reader on RSS.com (2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ben managed all the customer interactions on the site and had several great ideas for improving both the product and experience. For example, Ben\u2019s idea for giving every customer an @rss.com email address that could ingest email newsletters and parse them as if they were RSS feed items turned out to be quite useful, and later adopted more broadly in feed readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, however, it became clear that greater market factors were going to dictate the success or failure of RSS readers. Social sites like Facebook developed \u201cfeeds\u201d that allowed, then encouraged, then propagated news within a user’s profile feed. Essentially social media took over and improved the feed reader experience with items curated by friends or algorithms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually in mid 2016 Facebook, which started out as a microblogging site with interconnected RSS feeds, terminated its RSS notifications feed. The writing seemed to be on the wall for the wider abandonment of RSS feeds in the public space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly enough however, it was around this time there was a massive uptick in Google searches for phrases like \u201cpodcast RSS feed.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/span>A Partnership is Forged \ud83e\udd1d<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As podcasting started to grow in popularity, Ben realized that his domain had the potential to be a space for podcasts to be played or created. With that in mind, in July of 2017<\/b> Ben began looking for a partner to shift the focus of the domain and develop something amazing. Because the Podcast Generator open source software was still making waves online, it didn\u2019t take long for Alberto to come up in Ben\u2019s quest for a partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ben’s First Email to Alberto in Spanish, Italian, and English (July 19, 2017)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One email from Ben to Alberto later, and the two began to explore the possibility of leveraging the domain RSS.com and the technology of Podcast Generator to offer a fully-managed podcast hosting service. The two quickly went to work evaluating interest, and what they learned showed a clear market appetite for a podcast hosting platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Early-stage Product and Tech Roadmap for RSS.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>RSS.com is Born<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On January 29, 2018<\/b> the first version of RSS.com rolled out. Though the first version was basic, it proved to be a solid product-market fit. Over the next year and a half, Alberto and Ben built it up to the point that a new cloud infrastructure and a more modern technology stack was needed to cope with the increasing traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From August 2018 to August 2019, RSS.com grew over 14,000% (fourteen thousands percent) in users and MRR!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Due to the need to scale up, and the increased resources to grow the team, in summer 2019, Alberto and Ben started working on a brand new version of RSS.com, completely redesigned and re-architected from the inside out. The new version would move to a new cloud infrastructure leveraging state-of-the-art storage and computation services, as well as a content distribution network. Then, on January 16, 2020<\/b>, the new version of the RSS.com platform was launched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today<\/strong>, Alberto and Ben, along with their world-class team of designers, engineers, content creators and marketing gurus continues shipping product improvements, new technology and innovative features<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/span>Timeline<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

2005<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

An Idea is Born<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Alberto writes a web-based software for his university in Italy (University of Bergamo<\/a>) to allow the creation of Educational Podcasts where teachers could share their classes as podcast episodes for their students<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2006<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

April 2006 – Alberto Launches Podcast Generator<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Alberto released his web-based podcast publishing software under the name of Podcast Generator<\/a> (PG) and released it under an open source license, which allowed anyone around the world to download and use it. The official announcement from April 5, 2006<\/a> states: “Here is the very first release (0.6) of Podcast Generator! The basic script works well, however the code is very messy and has to be optimized. This version doesn’t require MYSQL and relies on text files to store mp3 description; I’m already working to support MYSQL and planning a lot of major improvements in the next weeks<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alberto Participates in the First European Podcasting Events<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In 2006, Alberto started to get involved in the local podcasting scene by participating in the first Podcasting day in Bologna (Italy) in May 2006 and later in other European events, such as the Podcasting Day in Barcelona (Spain) in October 2006, where he was invited to present Podcast Generator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alberto Betella presenting Podcast Generator in Barcelona, Spain, at the “Jornades de Podc\u00e0sting” (Podcasting Days) on October 2006 [Photos by Jose Antonio Gelado. License CC BY-NC].<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Podcast Generator is Used by Hundreds of Organizations\u200b Globally<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In only a few months after the launch of Podcast Generator (PG), hundreds of organizations and institutions all over the world started to use PG to offer their services including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n