There a few podcast networks that have their own software but if you want good data on your listeners you're basically stuck between Blubrry & Libsyn and they're both severely outdated platforms. And you pretty much have to use iTunes.
I've been toying around with building my own open platform for podcast hosting/analytics for a while since I could use it for my own podcast and I have friends who would use it.
We built https://www.podigee.com/en as a podcast hosting platform, batteries included. You just need to upload an audio file, add the relevant metadata, and we will take care of everything else (improving and encoding the audio into different formats, generating a blog with a correct RSS feed, delivering your audio through a nice, embeddable player from our CDN, connecting with social media accounts, etc.).
The platform itself is mostly built with Ruby on Rails + AngularJS, the CDN is a highly-optimized nginx with some clever Lua scripts.
We provide world-class, personalized support to free and paid accounts. The business model is based on paying for a given amount of minutes of audio per month, no matter how big your back catalog is.
We have been doing it mostly in our free time, but have a good bunch of paying (and happy!) customers. We even help you with getting your feed on iTunes without the hustle.
Sorry for the (probably annoying) marketing speech, but it's something we've been doing out of passion and mostly in our free time. Happy to answer any of your questions!
It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.
Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time?
You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
And an open platform could still be built to do all of that.
I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
Note that I don't understand how a podcast is different from a radio show that somebody recorded on a computer, so maybe I'm missing key functionality.
You can barely track how many people download, let alone listen, when they stop, etc. All the things advertisers want to know.
It's still a hard thing to integrate an RSS feed into a modern website...RSS is only really popular with podcasts and hasn't had much development in a while. Working with XML sucks.
Libsyn and Blubrry manage this part for you (having an RSS feed that is also a site's content and does tracking) but you're limited to hosting on their sites, wordpress or needing a developer.
There's a lot of room for improvement here.
There are lots of Podcasts on SoundCloud.
Well, F them.
Since the audio data is coming from servers that are under our control, we can get interesting data like the amount of bits that have been downloaded / streamed by a specific client. It's not perfectly accurate, but there is some tricks you can do just by matching the user agent + ip + the bits requested. You can for sure get a better picture than just knowing that someone has downloaded an episode.
And yes, advertisers want to know everything, but at the same time, are clicks on banners an accurate way of knowing if people are really interested in your ads? Can you say that people really watch all the TV ads and do not go to the toilet instead? These are tough problems to solve, yet there are some approximations that should be good enough.
Which is why podcasters don't have any good statistics.
I recommend listening to the Startup podcast, they do a great job of explaining how the industry works :)