Elisa Graf is both a writer and an editor and has started a podcast called Mystic Takeaway. She loves stories about the transcendent and the everyday world colliding, and the surprise, joy, and wonder that ensues. Her podcast showcases extraordinary stories of mysterious encounters, miraculous healings, etc…
In our conversation, we found ourselves talking about podcast show statistics. They come up often when people first dive into podcasting. They quickly realize there’s an array of numbers that can be tracked. But what do those numbers mean? What numbers should you be shooting for? What does a “download” or “listener” even mean? But rather than dive into techno-babble, I was curious about what first surprised Elisa about podcasting stats when she published her podcast.
When you open a Simplecast account, they have this little section called analytics. They tell you all the countries where downloads have come from. A download isn’t necessarily a listen, but it’s a good chance that people are listening if they download it. Simplecast shows you the total download numbers, what times of day, your most-downloaded episodes, and which podcast players they’re being downloaded on. Apple podcasts is at the top all the time. But I’ve gone back and forth between being addicted to looking at that, and trying to keep it out of my sight.
~ Elias Graf
While there remains some contention around the topic, consensus has formed around the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) efforts to uniformly define podcast statistics. (The IAB’s mission is to, “Engage a member community globally to develop foundational technology and standards that enable growth and trust in the digital media ecosystem.”) Through several revisions, an industry-wide standard has been created as a set of podcast measurement guidelines. If you want to dig into podcast statistics, and the IAB’s efforts, (and the controversies,) I suggest beginning with Podnews.net’s IAB articles.
If a show is going to try to sell advertising, then someone needs to understand the statistics because that’s how advertising is sold. But if we can avoid it, I’m with Elisa and I don’t want to overthink it. But even without diving into the specifics, there’s a lot we can learn from just a high-level look at the statistics.
I’m an analytic thinker and I love to run little, (or not so little,) experiments to try to answer questions I have. In March of 2020, I started a simple, daily podcast reading short quotations from my collection. My question was: What would happen if I put up a simple episode every single day for 365 days? What would happen if I did nothing else, and simply published it? It’s been nearly 500 days and it’s coming up on 16,000 downloads. It’s averaging more than 100 unique listeners per week, and has been downloaded in significant numbers in more than 10 countries.
My first take-away from the experiment is that listeners will discover podcasts. I don’t know if that’s from the podcast directories or podcast player applications recommending them, or from other listeners sharing. But my little experiment definitely got discovered by listeners. Even more interesting is that—related to Elisa’s comments about what countries are people downloading from—I find it inspiring to see all the different places where my work is being heard. This tiny little bit of work that I’m doing to create each episode is reaching people all over the world.
Elisa and I agreed that it’s important not to get overly focused on the stats. She has so many good reasons for what she’s doing, and it’s not about how many people are listening. At the same time, people have been popping up telling her they love all her episodes, or that they’ve been listening since the beginning. They’re mostly people she already knows in the meditation space. None the less, it’s fun to hear that other people value one’s work.
work in progress