How to estimate subscriber counts

[Craig]

How is everyone doing subscriber count estimates? Right now I'm just looking at the number of times each podcast MP3 is downloaded during the first 24 hours after it's uploaded. Has anyone come up with a more accurate technique?

Craig

[Insomnia Radio]

I would say the best concrete way is to gather stats that track UNIQUE, COMPLETE hits to your individual mp3 files.

Also, a 24 hour guage is good, but not very reliable. I've seen a lot of fluctuation and activity in the first 48 hours.

[notyourusualbollocks]

Just out of curiosity - what are the rough number of downloads people are experiencing?

I'm planning to shortly jump on the band wagon with a show focusing on independent music releases from the UK.

Jason - keep up the good work as I've been listening to your show and it's great inspiration.

I guess I have two concerns so far:

1. Audience
2. RIAA legality. I saw a post earlier on about licensing fees so I may look into this but then again, I'll be podcasting mostly obscure stuff.

I'm pretty excited about it all though. For years I've been eyeing up online broadcasting technologies as a way to do my own little shows but podcasting is a far more practical way to get the stuff out. I just hope over time people will start to adopt it.

MK

[Funtime Ben]

What we need is somebody with more brains than I to devise some nifty Podcast stat counter thing. it could tell you all the downloads in a 48 hour time period, how many times the files were accessed by an iPodder client, and total number of downloads... That would give you a very good idea.

we could call it PodStat! what do you think?

Now who are we going to persuade to build the thing? Adam's got back into programming...

Great conversation guys.

I usually go by the eany meanie miney moe approach to determining how many subscribers I have. Not very exact.

[cc_chapman]

If you set up your feed through http://www.feedburner.com they give you a cool piece of code that will track the number of subscribers through that feed.

I just reset up my feed through them and if you go to http://www.rbradio.net in the upper right hand corner you'll see the counter. It's a quick way to see subscribers which is pretty **** cool.

Plus, I like how they make it a SIMPLE URL for the feed and the look of the actual page is pretty **** neat as well. For example here is mine:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/RealityBitchslapRadio

[Insomnia Radio]

Cool and Cooler!!!

Feedburner continues to impress...however, don't you think it's crippling to your show to change your RSS?

I would absolutely love to do this (and should've done this in the beginning) but am afraid I would LOSE subscribers...

Way to go on your end though...Love the show, by the way.

[Insomnia Radio]

I'm doing it anyway..that's way too useful

[cc_chapman]

You don't lose anything because when you set it up with Feedburner you give them your current Feed and they set up a sort of redirect for it.

So the old one doesn't go away. It's still there. But, if you start advertising the new Feedburner link you'll start counting new subscribers. That is what is great about it.

[Craig]

That does sound cool. The only problem I have with it is I'm then dependent on someone else...if Feedburner has glitches or, worse, goes away I've got a problem and a lot of confused and potentially lost subscribers.

What I'm looking for is something that runs on my server.

Craig

[Funtime Ben]

I totally agree, I want a copy on my server. Not that I don't trust outside sources, but I don't want to be dependent on somebody else. Maybe have to pay in the future.

Plus the mechanics of setting up a stat that checks if the request is form an iPod client and then logging the IP, you could really get a very good idea of the subscription traffic. There is really no need to go to someone else.

[Craig]

Unless I'm missing something, the ipodder clients aren't identifying themselves as ipodder clients.

Craig

[Jestre]

There is a lot of variation here (as in all things podcast), but most of the clients do actually identify themselves when they send a request.

[Funtime Ben]

Most iPodders do actually give their name and number when visiting a site. On my server's stat counter the requests look like this:

#: #reqs: #pages: browser
--: -----: ------: -------
1: 550: 22: iPodder
: 550: 22: iPodder/1
2: 249: 6: iPodderX
: 249: 6: iPodderX/2
3: 66: 66: Doppler
: 66: 66: Doppler/2
4: 63: 1: BlogMatrix Jaeger 1.6 (http:
: 63: 1: BlogMatrix Jaeger 1.6 (http://jaeger
5: 58: 11: Mozilla
: 46: 9: Mozilla/1
6: 45: 3: jPodderv
: 45: 3: jPodderv/0
7: 36: 23: Nimiq
: 34: 21: Nimiq/1
: 2: 2: Nimiq/0
8: 19: 1: CFNetwork
: 19: 1: CFNetwork/1
9: 11: 11: MovableType
: 11: 11: MovableType/2
10: 11: 8: MSIE
: 11: 8: MSIE/6
11: 11: 4: Safari
: 7: 2: Safari/125
: 4: 2: Safari/85
12: 10: 5: Netscape (compatible)
13: 7: 6: podcast spider v0.7 (www.podcast.net)
14: 3: 1: msnbot
: 3: 1: msnbot/0
15: 3: 1: Googlebot
: 3: 1: Googlebot/2
16: 2: 2: Python-urllib
: 2: 2: Python-urllib/1
17: 2: 1: Baiduspider+(+http:
: 2: 1: Baiduspider+(+http://www
18: 1: 1: unchaos_crawler_2.0.2 search.engine@unchaos.com
: 167: 0: [not listed: 21 browsers]


If we could tie these requests to files being served we would basically have what we need.

[Craig]

That's weird...for some reason my ISP's stats program is lumping them all into an "unknown" category in its browser report.

Craig

[Craig]

OK, I'm experimenting with different log analysis software to get at the aggregator info. In the process I've noticed that Nimiq generates a ton of hits in order to get a single file...71 hits in order to download 3 files in one case (68 of the hits downloaded 0 bytes, the other 3 downloaded the entire MP3). Has anyone else noticed this? I've sent an email and the relevant entries from the log file to the developers.

Craig

[theFerf]

Craig:

that is really strange..I have never heard of anything like that before...with all those hits. I hope they guys at Nimiq can fix that (if it is indeed their problem).

[Funtime Ben]

Hey Kids,

I talked with the Nimiq folks a few days ago and they are trying to fix the problem. Nimiq was apparently checking that the audio files are there, which is why it's screwing our stats.

Hopefully the developer will get the situation fixed shortly, but as an intermediate step I will point them over to this thread and yall can interface with them directly.

Have a great weekend!

[Mark]

Craig

I'm with you. I look at the first 24hrs but then I sorta checkin about a week later. I'm definately one of the smaller audience shows so I usually don't put much effort into stat watching. Unless of course I one day see zero. ;-)

My web provider doesn't tell me which "thing" is doing the download, (alot of unknowns listed) but I can tell how many times each show is downloaded.

My motto, from Dave and Adam, keep it short, try to keep it on topic, and keep it short. ;-)

Take care.

[chaime]

Hi,

I'm the developer of Nimiq and noticed that a couple of people were experiencing a lot of file request from Nimiq through their webserver. I'm in the process of analysing this problem and subsequently fixing it. If you notice a lot of requests coming from Nimiq without actually downloading the file, please let me know at chaime@nimiq.nl

Any kind of server log would be much appreciated. I'm doing the best I can to fix this when I have the time, sorry for the inconvenience guys. It would also be of much help if you could let me know which server and version number you're using.

Thanks,

[notyourusualbollocks]

I find the stats stuff really interesting to be honest. I literally sit there every hour pressng the refresh button on my logs to see who's come in..

...kidding.. :)

Seriously, anyone here using libsyn and their stats program? It's simple but effective. Anyone found anything better recently and wouldn't it be great to have some kind of independent tracking system to sort the men out from the boys? ;)

[radioclash]

Thanks Craig for pointing out this thread...!

I suppose a lot of this could be done by cross-referencing or filtering the data on User Agent (iPodder, IE et al) with the unique visitors to your MP3 file...

I think this can be done via software or script; anyone know of any good free or nearly free WebStats / Log Analysis packages or scripts? They all seem to be either impossible to setup (analog) or expensive.

I've used WebLogs Expert in the past and that's good as you can tell it to track files such as MP3, don't know whether you can cross-reference that info with UserAgents...

Oh and hits is difficult since I get something like 16,000 hits and 11,000 unique visitors on my feed over the last 12 days, but I have no way of knowing if that was people pinging it, looking at it via podcast.net and potkast.net style 'players', actual subscribers or people just looking at the feed in browsers and wandering off... :roll:

If I could see those people were looking via say iPodder or Jaeger or Nimiq that would be more reassuring...

And of course I can't run scripts on my MP3 server as it won't allow that (temporary measure due to bandwidth and download problems but that server won't allow scripts, adn I don't have money for a new server yet)...so any clever redirection script or the podcasting software actually giving me that info back when someone subscribes would be great....

I mean can't the client actually report back, ala blog 'trackbacks', that you've subscribed? Or send me an email or something?

[Craig]

Oh and hits is difficult since I get something like 16,000 hits and 11,000 unique visitors on my feed over the last 12 days, but I have no way of knowing if that was people pinging it, looking at it via podcast.net and potkast.net style 'players', actual subscribers or people just looking at the feed in browsers and wandering off... :roll:

If I could see those people were looking via say iPodder or Jaeger or Nimiq that would be more reassuring...
That's why you need to track hits on the MP3 files and count complete downloads by unique visitors using podcast clients. And redirection doesn' work, unfortunately, since it breaks a lot of clients at the moment.

I've experimented with several different stats packages, both free and demos of paid ones, and while a few let you get at the data you need, they don't give you the numbers you want. A script is the logical answer. We just need someone to write it.

Craig

[camilian]

I am working on a simple stats "filter" program for my site. Most of my hits come from the mp3 direct and not the rss feed, so I wanted to seperate them out. It's not done yet, but I am getting close. If anyone is using a server with php, I will give you the code when I am done.

[Craig]

I'd be interested Chris...I have the same need. Thanks.

Craig

[beatfreax]

Hello there, I'm new here!

Been reading some stuff and playing with podcasting for a few weeks now. It totally rocks indeed!! Though I think there's still a lot to be developed....

I've been thinking about the stats/subscriptions stuff as well and've come up with quite a simple solution I think.

I created this small PHP file which just opens, reads and then displays the XML file in your browser. In this PHP file you could put all kinds of tracers, no prob. Only thing you have to do now is don't let people subscribe to your XML feed, but PHP file.

I think this could work very nice, anyone has any comments?

[bob]

But wouldn't that count the number of dings your RSS (or php) gets as opposed to the actual mp3 downloads?

I'm currently using a php to generate my feed, so I'm quite interested in this..

[camilian]

The trick is having the code read the hits to the php file, register the ip of connected client, and then register if that ip was sent the mp3. Pretty simple, I just need to find the time to work on it.

[beatfreax]

The trick is having the code read the hits to the php file, register the ip of connected client, and then register if that ip was sent the mp3. Pretty simple, I just need to find the time to work on it.

Exactly!!

Built that in just an hour or something, but gives me quite some info; who downloaded the feed (well, which IP though), when, how many times and with what. I've built an IP-block as well, but still thinking of a work-around, because a lot of end users don't have a regular IP.

[camilian]

Session cookies? I know these can be punked, but what about something that combines/checks these with IP? just thinking out loud...

[jawbone]

I have a real quick question regarding feedburner. I went ahead and used Feedburner to count my subscriber stats, but my question is how do I update my XML file? Do I just continue doing what I'm doing and Feedburner will do the rest? I guess what I'm asking is do I need to upload my XML file to feedburners servers at all?

I hope this isn't a stupid question, but I'm unsure how Feedburner works.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!