Story
In 2005, podcasting was finding its wings. In the United States, Adam Curry and Dave Winer had recently laid the medium's foundation, and Libsyn had launched the first dedicated hosting service. But while the spirit of the medium was radically open, the technical barrier to entry remained high. For many, launching a podcast still meant wrestling with RSS feeds, hand-written XML markup, and server configurations.
Meanwhile, at the University of Bergamo in northern Italy, professor Marco Lazzari had an idea: a university podcast, so students could listen to lectures on their own time. Alberto Betella, one of his students at the time, offered to build the tool to make it happen.
Alberto called it Podcast Generator, released it as free and open source software, and on April 5, 2006, put it on SourceForge. Around the same time, Pluriversiradio, one of the first educational podcasts in Europe, went live.
Podcast Generator lowered the barrier dramatically: anyone with basic web hosting could now publish a podcast without touching a line of code. It turned out the problem wasn't just academic. Within months, Podcast Generator spread far beyond the classrooms it was built for, as churches, government agencies, schools, artists, and individual creators across the globe started using it, with no marketing and no company behind it.
What happened next was organic. A community formed around the project: researchers and authors cited it in academic papers and books, 269 volunteers translated it into 59 languages, and in 2012 it became a one-click install on Softaculous alongside WordPress and other popular web applications. Alberto maintained it alone, in his spare time, for over 13 years.
By July 2017, Alberto was still maintaining Podcast Generator when Ben Richardson, who owned a domain called RSS.com, reached out to explore a collaboration.
After over a decade maintaining Podcast Generator as a passion project, Alberto had come to believe that self-hosted podcast publishing would eventually need to move to the cloud. Ben reaching out was both serendipitous and perfect timing, and their collaboration gave birth to RSS.com, officially launched on January 29, 2018.
This website tells a story spanning two decades: a small open source degree project from a university in Italy that quietly powered a generation of podcasters and eventually evolved into a global platform that continues that same mission today. It exists to preserve the history of a tool that mattered to a lot of people, and perhaps to remind someone out there that a thing built out of curiosity and passion, with no business plan and no real funding, can end up going further than you ever imagined.
Sources & Methodology
Wherever possible, the historical content on this page is verifiable through independent sources. Links marked with 🏛️ point to the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive's public record of the web. These snapshots were captured independently and cannot be edited or fabricated. They serve as timestamped proof: that the software existed, that the websites looked a certain way, that the announcements were made on the dates stated, and so on.
On download estimates (500,000+)
As a deliberate design choice, Podcast Generator never included any tracking, analytics, or phone-home mechanism. There was simply no way to know the exact number of downloads and installations across all distribution channels. The figure of 500,000+ is a carefully reasoned lower-bound estimate based on verified data and conservative assumptions.
SourceForge analytics recorded 221,235 downloads across all 29 releases published between 2006 and 2026 from 214 different countries. This is the only channel with fully public, verifiable numbers.
Podcast Generator was added to Softaculous in 2012, making it available as a frictionless one-click install on hosting providers such as Bluehost, HostGator, Namecheap, DigitalOcean, and many others. On Softaculous, installing the software required no manual download or setup.
Between April 2012 and April 2026, SourceForge recorded 128,233 downloads. Applying a deliberately conservative 2x multiplier for the much easier Softaculous one-click channel adds an estimated ~256,500 installations. Combined with the full 221,235 verified SourceForge downloads, this produces a conservative floor of ~477,700.
When we also account for the 23 GitHub releases (with no tracking) and other unmeasured mirrors and repackaging, the total easily crosses 500,000 downloads and installations worldwide.
On podcasts powered (25,000+)
Podcast Generator never tracked installations, so the true number of podcasts it powered will never be known. However, several independent data points reveal the scale.
A search for the exact string "Powered by Podcast Generator" (the default footer of every installation) returned approximately 17,200 results on Google in January 2021. While this may be inflated by multiple indexed pages per installation, it also misses sites that removed or customised the footer, and sites no longer indexed at that specific point in time.
When contacted in September 2025, Softaculous confirmed approximately 1,900 active installations on their platform. A research we conducted on 2 April 2026 on the Podcast Index data dump found 3,281 RSS feeds generated by Podcast Generator and still present in the index.
These are the visible traces of a much larger picture. Most installations were never indexed by Google, never listed in the Podcast Index, and have long since gone offline. A conservative 5% conversion rate from the total downloads (factoring in test installs and abandoned setups) points to an estimated 25,000 unique podcasts over the project's lifetime. With over 3,000 feeds still alive in 2026, over three years after the latest release, the real number is likely higher.
