Here We Grow Again - Moving to Spotify

Today we signed a one-year contract with Spotify to be our hosting, ad provider, and analytics platform. We're excited to be part of the Megaphone (owned by Spotify) family.

Deep breath - we are not becoming exclusive on Spotify or firewalling the podcast behind a subscription. We made this decision because we have outgrown our current provider. We had expected after the one-year mark of the Russia-Ukraine War, that interest would start to fall off, but our audience has continued to grow. According to Chartable, we are in the top 750 podcasts on the planet for audience reach.

Next week, we will be changing the plumbing to the podcast from our current provider to Spotify. We are hopeful and have been assured this transition will be invisible to our audience.

Q: What happens to the existing archive of podcasts?
A: Nothing. They will still be available.

Q: Will the link russiaukrainewarpodcast.com still work?
A: There will be a transition period where the link will point to the archive on our current host provider and will not contain new episodes. We will build a new website in April after we have completed changing the "plumbing" and verify that the transition to Spotify is complete. The new website will have additional features.

Q: Will I have to update my subscription on the podcast platform of my choice?
A: No. Regardless of the platform you're on, the change will be invisible once the transition is complete. Some of the smaller podcast sites may need up to a week to transition.

Q: I have bookmarks in my browser to specific episodes on the russiaukrainewarpodcast.com website. Will they still work?
A: Probably not. We will have an error page that will provide a link to the new archive.

Q: Why did you make this change?
A: First and foremost, we have no complaints about our current provider. If you ever wanted to start a podcast, we couldn't recommend them enough. However, they don't have the capabilities for large podcasts, and because of you, we're much larger than we ever thought we would be. We are hitting limits on data analytics and monetization opportunities (ads), which we have run from time to time in the past.