Podcast Host Email & Lead Scraper (Pay Per Email Found)

Turn a list of podcasts — or a single niche keyword — into a clean contact list of publicly listed podcast host business emails and social profiles. You pay only when an email is actually found. No email, no charge.

Feed the actor niche keywords, Apple Podcasts IDs, or RSS feed URLs. It resolves each show through the public iTunes Search / Lookup API, fetches the show's RSS feed, and returns the host's business email and social links it can find, one tidy record per show — signed out, no login, no API keys, no browser.

• 📧 Publicly listed host business emails, with provenance (owner / website / linktree)
• 🔗 Social profiles: Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Discord, Telegram, website
• 📊 Show metadata: category, episode count, last-episode date, active status, language, author
• 💰 Pay-per-result — priced per email found, not per subscription. A show with no email costs you nothing.

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🎯 Best for

Self-identify in two seconds — this actor is built for:

• Podcast guesting / PR outreach — build a list of shows to pitch yourself or a client onto, with a contact email attached.
• Podcast sponsorship & ad sales — go from a niche shortlist to reachable host inboxes.
• Agency lead generation — turn a niche keyword into a queue of podcast leads for a client.
• Media & influencer sourcing — surface active shows in an adjacent niche and their public business contact.
• Sales prospecting into the creator / podcast economy — enrich a show list with email + socials before you reach out.

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🔒 What makes this scraper different (and safer)

It runs signed out and reads only public surfaces — the public iTunes Search / Lookup API and the show's own public RSS feed. There is no login, no CAPTCHA, no API key, and no browser.

Where the emails come from

Public surfaces, signed out:

1. the show's RSS feed <itunes:owner> email tag (the contact address Apple requires a podcaster to publish for their own show), with managingEditor / webMaster as fallbacks, and
2. — one hop, optional — the show's own linked website / Linktree, when the feed exposes no owner email.

What it deliberately does NOT do

• ❌ Does not log into anything and does not touch private or gated data. An email a host keeps off their public feed and off their linked site simply won't appear here.

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🎧 Scope & limits (read this)

• Apple Podcasts + RSS only. Discovery is via the public iTunes catalog, and extraction is from the show's public RSS feed. Spotify-exclusive and YouTube-exclusive shows have no public RSS feed with an owner email, so they are out of reach by design — there is no public surface to read.
• The owner email is whatever the podcaster published. Many shows list a real host/booking address; some list a generic hello@ or a network address; some omit it entirely (in which case the optional one-hop website scan may still recover one).
• episodeCount is the number of episodes present in the feed. Most feeds carry the full back catalog, but some publishers truncate their feed to the most recent N — for those, the count reflects the feed, not the show's lifetime total.

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⚙️ How it works

Plain HTTP — no browser, no key, no login:

1. Resolve the show.
   • Keyword → the public iTunes Search API (itunes.apple.com/search?media=podcast) returns matching shows, each with its canonical feedUrl. Billed per search query.
   • Apple Podcasts ID → the public iTunes Lookup API (itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=…) returns that one show's feedUrl + metadata.
   • RSS URL → used directly.
2. Fetch the RSS feed and parse it with a dependency-free XML reader.
3. Extract the host email from <itunes:owner><itunes:email> (fallbacks: channel itunes:email, managingEditor, webMaster).
4. If no owner email, follow the show's linked website / Linktree one hop and regex-extract mailto: and plain-text emails.
5. Also emit website, category, episode count, last-episode date / active status, and social links.

Built-in resilience (shared with the maintainer's other scrapers):

• up to 3 retries per request with backoff, and a body-download-safe timeout,
• a response-size cap so a runaway feed can't exhaust memory,
• run-global de-duplication by Apple collection ID / feed URL, so a show discovered twice is fetched, charged, and emitted once,
• honest error output — a show whose feed ultimately fails to fetch is written to the dataset as { "status": "error", "errorDetail": "...", "feedUrl": "..." } rather than silently dropped.

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▶️ How to use (no code required)

1. Create a free Apify account.
2. Open this actor and either type niche keywords into Search keywords, paste Apple Podcasts IDs into Apple Podcasts IDs, or paste feed URLs into RSS feed URLs.
3. (Optional) cap Max shows per keyword and set your Country storefront to control cost and coverage.
4. Click Start.
5. Watch rows appear in the Output tab, then export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML — or pull it via the API.

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📥 Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
searchKeywords	array of strings	[]	Each keyword runs an iTunes Search query and queues the discovered shows. Billed per search query.
applePodcastIds	array of strings	[]	Apple Podcasts numeric show IDs — the number in podcasts.apple.com/…/id<THIS>. Resolved to a feed via the iTunes Lookup API.
rssFeedUrls	array of strings	[]	Direct podcast RSS feed URLs. Skips iTunes resolution.
maxShowsPerKeyword	integer	50	How many shows to collect per keyword search. Min 1, max 200.
country	string	"us"	ISO storefront code for the iTunes Search & Lookup APIs.
scanLinkedWebsites	boolean	true	When the feed exposes no email, follow the show's website / Linktree one hop and extract emails.
includeSocialLinks	boolean	true	Return the show's linked social profiles parsed from the feed.
activeWithinDays	integer	90	A show is flagged isActive: true when its newest episode is newer than this. Informational — does not filter output.
dedupeEmails	boolean	true	One record per show, with emails deduped across all sources.

Example input

{
  "searchKeywords": ["home barista", "indie game dev"],
  "applePodcastIds": ["1200361736"],
  "rssFeedUrls": ["https://feeds.simplecast.com/54nAGcIl"],
  "maxShowsPerKeyword": 50,
  "country": "us",
  "scanLinkedWebsites": true,
  "includeSocialLinks": true,
  "activeWithinDays": 90,
  "dedupeEmails": true
}

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📤 Output

One record per show, written to the dataset as results come in. Export it as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML, or read it through the API.

{
  "showTitle": "Indie Coffee Show",
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.example.com/indiecoffee",
  "hostEmail": "jane@indiecoffee.show",
  "emailSource": "owner",
  "website": "https://indiecoffee.show",
  "category": "Arts",
  "author": "Jane Barista",
  "language": "en-us",
  "episodeCount": 142,
  "lastEpisodeAt": "2026-07-02T10:00:00.000Z",
  "isActive": true,
  "collectionId": "1200361736",
  "appleUrl": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1200361736",
  "artworkUrl": "https://…/600x600bb.jpg",
  "ownerName": "Jane Barista",
  "emails": [
    { "email": "jane@indiecoffee.show", "source": "owner", "domain": "indiecoffee.show" }
  ],
  "bestEmail": "jane@indiecoffee.show",
  "hasEmail": true,
  "socials": {
    "website": "https://indiecoffee.show",
    "instagram": "https://instagram.com/…",
    "x": "https://x.com/…"
  },
  "sourceMode": "keyword",
  "sourceKeyword": "home barista",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z",
  "status": "ok",
  "errorDetail": null
}

Field notes:

• emails — every email found for the show, each tagged with its source (owner, website, or linktree) and domain. Only sources the actor actually read are emitted.
• hostEmail / bestEmail — a single pick, preferring a business domain over a freemail address (Gmail, Outlook, etc.). emailSource records which surface it came from.
• hasEmail — true when at least one email was found. It's the gate for billing — no email, no charge — but the email-found event is priced per unique email, so a show with two emails is two events (see the worked example under Pricing).
• isActive — true when the newest episode is within activeWithinDays, false when older, null when the feed carries no dated episodes.
• sourceMode — "keyword", "apple_id", or "rss" depending on how the show entered the run. sourceKeyword is set when it was discovered via a keyword search.
• status — "ok" for a successful record, "error" for a feed that failed to fetch (with a human-readable errorDetail). Error rows are kept, not dropped.

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💰 Pricing (pay-per-event)

You are charged a fixed price per result event — not for platform usage or compute time.

Event	Price	Per 1,000	When you're charged
email-found	$0.02	$20 / 1,000	Once per unique email found. A show with no email is free.
keyword-search	$0.01	$10 / 1,000	Once per keyword search query executed.

No-find-free is the core trust mechanic: you never pay for a show that yields nothing. If a feed fails, it comes back as a status: "error" row — never as a phantom charge for data that does not exist.

What a run costs — a worked example: you scan 500 shows, 180 expose a host email (and 20 of those list two) → 200 unique emails × $0.02 = $4.00. Add 2 keyword searches at $0.01 → $0.02. Total: $4.02 — and the 320 shows with no email cost nothing.

The prices above are exactly what you're billed — nothing for platform usage or compute on top. Comparable Store actors price differently; compare the live listings and pick what fits your volume.

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❓ FAQ

Do I pay for shows that don't have an email? No. You are charged only when an email is actually found (hasEmail: true). A show that yields nothing — or a feed that errors — costs you nothing for the email event.

Why can't it find every podcast's email? Because it reads only what the podcaster published. Apple Podcasts + RSS is the surface; a Spotify-exclusive or YouTube-exclusive show has no public RSS feed with an owner email, and a host who lists no email anywhere public can't be surfaced. That's an honest scope limit, not a bug.

Can I test with a small list first? Yes. Start with two or three RSS URLs or one keyword, confirm the output looks right, then scale up. maxShowsPerKeyword caps volume and cost on keyword runs.

How do I maximize the hit rate? Point it at active, independently-produced shows — they most often publish a real host/booking email in their feed. Keep scanLinkedWebsites on so the actor can follow the one hop to the show's site when the feed itself omits the email.

Can I run it on a schedule or from my own code? Yes. Apify lets you run this actor from the Console UI, schedule it, call it via the Apify API, drive it with the apify-client SDKs for JavaScript and Python, run it from the Apify CLI, or connect it through an MCP server — and wire the output into Make, Zapier, Slack, Google Sheets, or a webhook.

Is it legal to scrape this? The actor reads only publicly available data, signed out. That said, some output fields are personal data (e.g. an email address). You should have a legitimate basis for collecting and using it and should comply with applicable law (GDPR/CCPA, Apple's and the feed publishers' terms, and anti-spam rules like CAN-SPAM). If you are unsure whether your use is legitimate, consult your own legal counsel.

What happens when a feed can't be fetched? The request is retried up to 3 times, then written to the dataset as a { "status": "error", "errorDetail": "…" } row. You get an honest record of what failed instead of a silently missing show.

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🔌 API-ready

This actor is a drop-in piece of a pipeline. Apify auto-generates integration snippets for it — JavaScript (apify-client), Python (apify-client), the Apify CLI, the REST API, an OpenAPI spec, and an MCP server — so you can call it from your own stack or an agent workflow. See the API tab on the actor page.

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Maintainer

Published by Jaxx. Categories: Lead generation · Social media.

Found a show that should have parsed but didn't, or a field you'd like added? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab — bug reports and extraction edge cases are actively reviewed.