I noticed that a number of major podcasters like NPR now have their own itunes.com vanity URLS like www.itunes.com/NPR. I would like to get such a URL for my own podcast but I can't find any information on how to create one. Does anyone know how this is done?
At a quick look it seems likely that this facility is only available for 'aggregated' podcasts - an iTunes page containing a number of podcasts from one provider, as with NPR or the BBC. I assume you have only the one podcast, so it's probably not available to you, though you could ask Support: go to https://itunespodcasts.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new and click the disclosure triangle at the right of the 'Choose a topic' field - choose 'Other' and proceed from there.
There is of course nothing to stop you creating your own short URL to redirect to iTunes: you should get your own domain name (it's not particularly expensive) with some webspace. Create a plain text with this content:
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=FULL URL OF YOUR ITUNES STORE PAGE"></HEAD><BODY></BODY></HTML>
Call the file index.html (make sure your text editor doesn't append .txt) and upload it to a directory on your webspace called, for example, Podcast. Then typing in your domain name/Podcast will take you straight to the iTunes Store web page.
Thanks Roger. At first that is what I thought too, that it was just the major networks who would qualify for this kind of URL, but then I saw that the popular YouTuber Anna Akana also has a vanity iTunes.com URL and she is an independent podcaster just like: www.itunes.com/explainthingstome. So this leads me to believe that it is available to podcasters beyond the majors but I can't seem to find any information on how to set up this kind of URL anywhere. Puzzling.
You could try emailing her and asking how she does it.
How to create a itunes.com vanity URL?
