I got a voice mail a while ago from a person who does an erotic stories podcast who had his podcast removed from iTunes. He had done fun stuff like D*ck for certain words, but he was removed anyway. Well I sent out this question to many people as I had never heard of such a thing. Special thanks and a Gold Start to jay Walsh from ProPodder.com for finding the official Apple Guidelines. They are:
The Submission Queue.
Upon submission, your podcast is placed in a queue for review by the iTunes staff. Your podcast may be rejected for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:
- Technical problems, usually the lack of episodes or the inability to download or play episodes. These problems can almost always be avoided by testing your feed using Subscribe to Podcast in the Advanced menu prior to submission.
- Requirement of a login or password to access the feed or any of the episodes.
- Strong prevalence of sexual content.
- Use of explicit language in the title, description or cover art of the podcast.
- Use of explicit language in the podcast when the
<explicit>tag is not set to “yes”. - Apparent misuse of copyrighted material or other violation of third party rights.
- Inclusion of offensive material, such as racist content or child pornography.
- Misrepresentational use of Apple copyright, including “iPod,” “iPhone,” “iPad,” “Apple TV” and “iTunes.”
In general, if there’s something that you want to convey about your feed, please do so in the summary field in your RSS feed, not in the content of an episode.
Normally, podcasts that are added to iTunes will appear first in iTunes search, and later in iTunes browse. Appearing in the browse category that you specified can take up to five days. The image associated with your podcast may also require additional time to appear, because images are edge-cached by iTunes and must propagate across the caching servers.
