Subscribers & new-episode email
An audience relationship you own — listeners subscribe on your Library, and every new episode automatically sends them its AI brief by email.
A Subscription is PodHood's owned-audience relationship: a listener follows your Channel from its public Library and automatically receives each new episode's AI brief by email — summary, chapters, and key moments, deep-linked to the exact second. Unlike a YouTube subscription, the relationship is yours: the roster in the Studio shows each subscriber's name and email address, and no algorithm sits between a new episode and their inbox.
There is nothing to set up. The Subscribe button, the subscriber roster, and the new-episode email ship with every Library on every plan — no external newsletter tool, form builder, or automation to wire up.
How listeners subscribe
Subscribe appears on the Library for every visitor. Clicking it signs the visitor in (Google or a one-time email code) and creates the follow; a signed-in visitor follows in one click. Because subscribing verifies a real email address, every follow is a reachable address, not an anonymous counter.
Subscribing works everywhere the Library is served:
- The default
<slug>.podhood.comsubdomain. - A verified custom domain — subscribers never leave your brand to follow you.
- A white-label Library — audience sign-in and new-episode email stay PodHood-operated while your branding leads.
A Subscription is not a YouTube subscription and does not grant Studio access. Your team doesn't need to subscribe: Channel Members automatically receive every new-episode email their audience gets, so each send doubles as a QA pass.
What the new-episode email contains
Each send is the episode's brief, not a bare "new episode is out" ping:
- Episode title, thumbnail, and grounded summary.
- The chapter map: every chapter and typed key moment (Insight, Quote, Q&A, Prediction, Debate, Story), each deep-linked to its timestamp in the Library reader.
- Listen now into the episode and Visit channel to the Library home.
- Your show's name as the sender, and the whole email rendered in your Channel's podcast language.
On a Channel with a verified custom domain, every link in the email is built on that domain, and a subscriber who is already signed in lands signed in — the email reads as yours end to end.
When it sends — and when it never does
PodHood checks your source for new episodes hourly. When a newly published episode finishes indexing, the email goes out automatically — once per episode, ever:
- Connecting a back catalog emails no one. Only episodes published within the freshness window (about a day) notify; importing years of archive stays silent.
- Re-indexing never re-sends. Each episode carries an at-most-once guard, so re-index, edits, and retries can't email your list twice.
The Subscribers page
Studio → Subscribers is the read-only roster of your audience:
- Headline counts: total followers, and how many are currently receiving email.
- Each subscriber's name, email address, subscribe date, and email status, newest first.
Muted ≠ left. A subscriber who mutes email keeps following your Channel and stays on the roster — they've silenced the notification, not the relationship. Subscribing again clears the mute.
Unsubscribe and deliverability
Every send carries the plumbing inboxes expect, so you never operate email infrastructure:
- One-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058
List-Unsubscribe) honored by Gmail and other major inboxes, plus a footer unsubscribe link — both mute the subscriber's email without deleting the follow. - Only verified addresses are ever sent to.
- PodHood sends on its own verified infrastructure; your Channel's name fronts the message.
Where this fits
- The Subscribe action lives on your Library; the roster lives in Studio.
- To see who's arriving before they subscribe — and which links, searches, and AI answers sent them — use Analytics.
- To hear what the audience wants next, see Comments.
