Chartable is Dead, Long Live… Websites?
This article was originally shared on Substack.
On September 27, Chartable sent an update that their service is being sunset on December 12, 2024. After their acquisition by Spotify in 2022 this news isn't too surprising.
The only thing I use Chartable for is SmartLinks which allows you to set up a landing page for your podcast or podcast episodes with your links to various podcast listening platforms. The great thing about this feature is that it's trackable and can give you data about clickthroughs and conversions with pretty charts and graphs to fulfil your data visualisation needs.
It's also great because it confirmed the stat I received from various podcast specialists that there's about a 10% conversion rate from social media, but that's more interesting than useful depending on how you look at it.
What now?
I only have the one SmartLink for my main podcast STEAM Powered as links for individual episodes are more effort than I have time for. But you know, I am going to miss this little tool when it goes.
Unfortunately, pickings are slim when it comes to finding a replacement.
Many outlets were reporting that Linkfire was the way to go for a trackable link and advertised that they had a free plan, but in less than a week since the announcement (it took me 5 days to find time to look for an alternative), they have removed their free plan. Presumably because the effort of dealing with all the Chartable refugees adding load to their infrastructure for free wasn't worth it.
CoHost is another option with a higher price point that has a similar offering.
Chartable's recommendation was of course to use Spotify for Podcasters' share feature, but that link only directs you to Spotify and has no way of offering links to other podcast listening platforms. While Spotify appears to have a large segment of the market, most of my listeners are not actually using it, so why alienate my potential audience who is unlikely to be on Spotify?
A few other services offer landing pages for free, but they're either unmaintained with now defunct services still linked, or don't provide tracking at all.
If you don't care about tracking, this brings us to Podnews' recommendation of just setting up a website. Many podcast hosting providers offer one as part of their plans, so either go with their provided URL or pick up a domain and point it at the page so that it's more portable if you move hosting providers.
If your hosting provider doesn't offer this service, there's always Podpage or a plethora of free or cheap one page site services to which you can attach a domain.
Sadly, I simply don't have the budget to spend on yet another service just to get trackable links, but I do have a website for STEAM Powered (built using Next.js and Netlify) and have now added my listening platform links to the top of my homepage and will be replacing my Chartable link with my domain on social media posts.
It's not trackable beyond the basic Google Analytics currently attached, but when I get some bandwidth I might see what I can do about getting a little more detail, perhaps in combination with OP3 which I've already got connected to my podcast feed.
That's pretty much it from me on that note, but if you're curious about the stats I have from Chartable, read on.
Clicks by the numbers
There are a few other graphs and things provided but these two for conversion by channel and player are the most interesting.
As a point of reference, my Chartable link is shared on my social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Patreon. I probably should have used them as my site link in the respective bios as well, but those use the domain instead.
If I was using these stats to determine which platforms I should stop bothering with, this wouldn't help. It’s good to know that half of my traffic comes from LinkedIn and Twitter, but it would be even nicer to know what "Not Set" and "link.chtbl.com" actually includes, and if I can do anything about it.
This one clearly demonstrates why I can't just use the Spotify share links. Spotify only accounts for 18.8% of those conversions, Apple Podcasts 8.3%, and Apple Music a hefty 2.1%.
This data isn't enough to warrant changing what I'm doing at the moment, but it's helpful to know and perhaps I can see what Google Analytics will tell me about where traffic is coming from and flowing to even if I can't map it to a conversion. That said, combined with OP3 , it’s probably enough to get by.
And that's all she wrote.
Stay curious,
— Michele