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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, 2’10"
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.
Many podcasters talk about posting audio clips, even short videos made from those audio clips, and getting good results on various social networks. But Elisa and I both know that if we aren’t paying for something, then we are the product being sold to the advertisers. The social networks are motivated to use algorithms to not show our posts to everyone that wants to see them, until we pay.
There’s much better success—more people see it and more people interact—when someone else shares something we’ve posted. Which leads immediately to the idea of asking our podcast guests to share what we’ve created.
But I’ve found that it’s really hard to get a guest to share your show. First we’re asking them to put their name behind our work. If I’ve created an hour-and-a-half podcast, and then I say “please share this,” the first thing someone thinks is, “I need to listen to all of it to make sure Craig didn’t make me sound like an idiot.” Now my simple, “please share,” request means they have to find that time to listen. In effect, I’m asking for another chunk of time, (in addition to the time they gave me when we recorded the podcast.) Worse, even if the guest enjoyed the recording process, they may still not want to hear themselves for fear of how they might sound.
(Here, I’m going to break from the narrative of my article a bit. I’m writing this article months after recording the episode. Just before I started working on this article, a podcaster asked me to share an episode we’d recorded about a month prior. All my suppositions above were perfectly revealed in my own thinking. “Share it? Well I’d have to listen to it first. And how long is it?” followed immediately by, “and do I really want to hear what I said?” Asking a guest to share may be an enormous ask for them. Caveat emptor.)
It’s totally true. One of my guests, said some things that I didn’t know were uncomfortable for him, and then didn’t want to share it. He told me after it was published, saying, “I wish I hadn’t said that. Because if it gets around to one of my friends, they’re gonna be upset.” It wasn’t hard for me to take those details out, so I said, “I’ll just go back and I’ll scrub them and I’ll just put it back up again.” He was so grateful, and after that I got a lot more listens on that particular one. So I think he did pass it around after that. But it’s hard. He didn’t want to listen to it. I don’t think he wanted to listen to himself. He had regrets about what he’d said. Then it was a period of a month or something. It took some time before we ironed that out— That he finally told me and then I was able to fix it. And then it took him a long time to listen to that. So it’s a process.
~ Elisa Graf, 9’33"
I believe we’re always going to have fans. The fans who listen to every episode. I could hide the podcast under a rock in the woods and they’d find it and listen. But settings the fans aside, I think most people who listen to my podcasts are listening to just one episode. We all know that as you build that body of work in the back-catalogue, the stories that we’re sharing don’t deteriorate. New listeners are going to find the episode via the topic that was talked about, or they’re going to find it via the person who was the guest. People will listen to that episode two, three or more years later.
I felt Elisa and I had come to the idea that we each simply have to do the hard work ourselves: I have to share my own things in a way I feel is appropriate and meaningful for what I’m sharing. I can’t rely on my guests. I can’t expect that just because I landed a really popular guest, that I can sit on their coattails. The power is in the value of the work even when it’s simply sitting there for years.