Podcasting is built on openness: a public RSS feed that any app can read. That openness has a downside. According to an investigation published on 27 October 2026 by Podnews, the hosting company Spreaker, owned by iHeart, lets anyone reproduce someone else's show, submit it to the major directories and insert advertising into it. The trade publication counted 1,778 programmes duplicated in this way.
An RSS feed is all it takes
To test the system, Podnews opened a free account, with no credit card, and pasted the RSS address of its own daily show, Podnews Daily, into Spreaker's import tool. Within minutes, every episode, the artwork, dates, titles and descriptions had been copied. No check confirmed that the person importing the feed actually owned it: no email sent to the address listed in the RSS, no verification code to insert, and no mention of copyright on the page.
Worse still, the tool offers to check automatically every hour for new episodes. The copy therefore stays permanently up to date without any intervention. From the distribution tab, all that remains is to submit the programme to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or iHeartRadio, a step Podnews deliberately chose not to take.
Monetisation approved within hours
The publication then applied to switch on monetisation for this programme, titled "Test". The process is supposed to include a human review; yet the application, filed while Spreaker's mostly European team was asleep, was approved by 10.30am Central European Time. The account could then run ads at the start and end of each episode, with the platform detecting silences to place more in the middle. According to its terms and conditions, Spreaker keeps up to 41% of advertising revenue.
To measure the scale of the problem, Podnews queried a copy of the Podcast Index dated 24 October 2026, looking for shows hosted both on Spreaker and with another host, with the same number of episodes and listed twice on Apple Podcasts. The 1,778 cases identified include well-known titles such as The Adam Carolla Show, Crime Junkie, Hidden Brain and The Rest is Politics.
Direct consequences for the original publisher
Every play captured by a copy is missing from the show's official statistics and earns its publisher nothing. A listener who subscribes to the duplicate by mistake leaves ratings and reviews in the wrong place, and hears ads the producer neither chose nor approved. Podcaster Lisa Lacy experienced this first-hand: an unauthorised copy of her show reached number 121 on a US Apple Podcasts chart within five days, while the official version sat at number one.
Asked for comment, Spreaker replied with a statement saying its rules forbid uploading content you do not have the rights to, and that its import tool honours the podcast:locked tag. Podnews notes, however, that the platform does not itself let users add that tag to their own programmes.
What webradios can do right now
Many webradios publish their shows, features or catch-up programmes as podcasts. They are therefore exposed to the same risk, with their measured audiences and any advertising revenue at stake. A few habits reduce the exposure:
- Lock your feed: enable the lock option offered by your host, which adds the podcast:locked tag to the RSS.
- Monitor directories: regularly search for the show's name, but also its artwork and descriptions, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Spreaker.
- Watch the numbers: a sudden drop in downloads always deserves a closer look.
- Document and report: keep screenshots, addresses and dates, then alert the host distributing the copy first.
Locking is not an absolute barrier, since it depends on platforms choosing to respect it. But until hosts introduce proper ownership checks, it remains the first protection to put in place.
Source: Podnews