E106 - How to understand podcast stats - Your Listening Habits Can Shed Some Light on This

How to understand podcast stats

It’s always nice to look at the numbers to see how your podcast is doing. But, podcast statistics can be confusing and complex.

Here are some details about how the different figures work, and how to read them.

Let’s get this out of the way first.

• A download is just a download of an episode.
• A stream doesn’t exist in podcasting.
• A listen, or a play, is when we know a human being has pressed the play button.
• Total audience numbers cannot be accurately worked out from downloads.

In podcast analytics, no audio ever “streams”: the audio is always downloaded. In this article, we use the word “stream” to convey the action of pressing play on a podcast you’ve not downloaded yet. To a podcast hosting company, that looks the same as a download: because it technically is.

Audio can be automatically downloaded to your phone, in case you want to hear it later. Or, audio can be downloaded when a listener wants to hear it - a “user-initiated download”. Your podcast hosting company doesn’t know if it’s an automatic download or a user-initiated download. It just knows it’s a download.

No podcast hosting company knows whether a piece of audio has ever been listened-to (a “listen” or a “play”). It can only ever know it’s been downloaded. (Podcast apps do know: but most don’t share that data).

And, of course, if an episode has had 2,000 downloads, that doesn’t mean it has 2,000 listeners. Automated downloads mean a podcast may be downloaded, but never listened-to. Or it might have been downloaded twice by someone.

13% of podcast downloads are never listened to.

https://podnews.net/article/understanding-podcast-statistics

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