How many is a lot of listeners? [Archive]

netactivist

Sep 13th, 2005, 04:57 PM

I'm somewhat familiar with website stats. With web sites, the way I look at it:

If you've got 3000 unique visitors a month (100/day), you're real small but it's something.

If you've got 30,000 unique visitors a month (1000/day), that's respectable.

If you're pulling in 300,000 unique visitors a month (10,000/day), you're a player.

If you're getting 3,000,000 uniques a month (100,000/day) you're a major media outlet!

With podcasts,what are the comparable numbers?

I would tend to divide the above website numbers by 5,or even 10, and base it on subscribers, as reflected in daily requests for your feed.

So 10-20 subscribers would be small, 100-200 subscribers would be respectable, 1000-2000 subscribers would be a player, and 10,000-20,000 subscribers would be a major media outlet.

Or am I way off?

I would love to hear everyone's take on this.

AaronfromQC

Sep 13th, 2005, 05:00 PM

Nobody knows what's a lot since no one really talks about their numbers.

ferg

Sep 13th, 2005, 05:11 PM

You're right, Aaron, and it's weird. Is it because everyone wants to pretend they're more popular than they are...??

Okay - let's make this the official number-sharing thread. I'll start (and I have no real clue where we fall in terms of popularity relative to other podcasts), so here's some random stats...

From our Web Server Stats:
~10,000 unique visitors for August
~250 GB of data transfer for August
~200-500 visitors per day for the month of august

Each episode is downloaded between 1000-1700 times. This is for the entire life of the episode.

Our Feedburner circulation yesterday was 653. Monday is usually the day that number is the highest, and that is the highest that number has ever been, but, lately, it's usually between 550 and 650.

There. That wasn't so hard.
Why is everyone so secretive??!

jeffoest

Sep 13th, 2005, 06:19 PM

Comparing numbers though is so apples and oranges quite often.

Well, we do have a Feedburner number of 622. We maxed out at 630 in July and steadily declined to about 557 before the recent reboost (probably due to some double-counting due to the new version of iTunes).

We don't have download size anymore since we went to Libsyn (makes me mad - I had nice graphs and everything)...

Our latest show on libsyn shows 1245 downloads so far as of about 20 minutes ago.

What is kind of interesting is that while Ferg and my download/subscribers are of similar orders of magnittute, we only got 2662 unique visitors to our website in August for an average of 83 per day. But, there again, different servers define 'unique' as something different - so who knows - but that's a pretty big order-of-magnitude difference. I use Stats Counter to measure that as our web server doesn't measure it.

To the original question. I think your roughly accurate there. I had posted something similar a while back with similar numbers from what little I could dig up on podcast volume research and I got no negative feedback from it.

I look at our stats and call us 'comfortably in the mid-size category'. If I were to guess (and it's just a guess) I would bet our volume places us in the top 80-90th percentile of podcasters even though we're only a mid-size podcast. I had estimated before that if a podcast had more than 1000 feedburner subscribers, I considered it a large podcast and I felt it represented probably about the 95th percentile. If a podcast had over 10000 Feedburner subscribers, it was mega-star and was in the 99.5th percentile.

Of course that's just my gut feelings (though based on some data I've seen) but I could be terribly off.

I think one of the reasons people are often hesitant to share numbers is they don't want to come across as either "small" or "cocky". But you know what? They are just numbers Who cares? To us, it's all just one silly "science" experiment anyways! lol

Anyone else care to share?

Art a GoGo

Sep 13th, 2005, 06:28 PM

I think I still have a link to a Feedburner page that offers some stats for the number of subscribers to various podcasts, but I don't have the url at work. It wasn't a very complete list of podcasts, so I'm guessing it was based on those podcasters that allowed their FeedBurner data to be shared.

Maybe someone else can provide the link.

CoffeeGeek

Sep 13th, 2005, 09:52 PM

Lessee.

Traditionally, summer is slow for a site like CoffeeGeek, which focuses on a hot beverage. In January this year, we had 482,000 total visitors, with a unique visitor count of 189,000, give or take a grand.

In August, those numbers were 312,000 / 146,000

The podcast is archived back about 15 episodes. There's basically three ways to get it, and the numbers I've collected (about a week ago) are collectively from all three sources. I have four shows over 5,000 unique downloads - 007, 004, 009, and 012. The rest hover around 4,000 or so for a show that's 10 days old. The most downloads (total count) for a show was 007, at 6,800 (some repeats)

For the most recent podcasts, I see a unique download count of about 1,500 in the first 24 hours after a podcast goes online. Then it holds steady at about 150-300 for the first five days, then peters out to less than 100 a day after that.

The cool thing is, even though older episodes have the most downloads, the show's first 24 hour download rate has constantly gone up. A month ago, it was maybe 750 the first day.

Mark

jeffoest

Sep 13th, 2005, 09:55 PM

Mark,

CoffeeGeek is a cool site!

podcastshuffle

Sep 13th, 2005, 10:07 PM

Maybe someone else can provide the link.

PodFeed.net (http://www.podfeed.net/category_item.asp?id=6) shows the FB count if the podcast has awareness on (MacCast is the example)

PodNova (http://www.podnova.com/index_feedburner_top40.srf) also has a Feedburner Top 40 list and lists a FB rank in their directory.

From our Web Server Stats:
~11,000 unique visitors for August
~170 GB of data transfer for August
~400-600 visitors per day for the month of August
~ FB Sub count of 720

Similar to Fergs but maybe my podcast is smaller in byte count (1500 downloads per epsiode -- last edit!.)

Jeff

jimk

Sep 13th, 2005, 10:12 PM

I'll give out stats, I don't care.

This is for August 2005:

Total Sessions 19,955.00
Total Pageviews 48,474.00
Total Hits 138,600.00
Total Bytes Transferred 402.62 GB
Average Sessions Per Day 643.71
Average Pageviews Per Day 1,563.68
Average Hits Per Day 4,470.97

Each episode is downloaded approximately 2000 times...give or take a hundred or two. The highest I ever saw my Feedburner number was 1250-ish, the lowest around 600. Right now it's 997.

CubicleJon

Sep 13th, 2005, 11:30 PM

Feedburner: 488

We have a special feed for our registered users (210 total, 117 subscribers) that allows us to talk to groups of listeners or specific listeners and allows our listeners to cut out segments of our show.

Total Subscribers: 605

All of our shows have at least 1,000 downloads.

Last 2 Months of webstats...

Total Sessions: 34,501
Total Pageviews: 126,828
Total Hits: 378,533
Total Bytes Transferred: 557.73GB

Average Sessions Per Day: 556.46
Average Pageviews Per Day: 2,045.61
Average Hits Per Day: 6,105.37
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day: 9.00GB
Average Pageviews Per Session: 3.67
Average Hits Per Session: 10.97
Average Bytes Per Session: 16.55MB

Hope this helps.

kickasspodcast

Sep 13th, 2005, 11:33 PM

What I love about podcasting is that yes, you can tell
how many hits and how many downloads.

But there is absolutely no way to know who actually listens.
No way of knowing who listens to 5 minutes or your
whole show.

I love that void of information!
Makes for less exploitation.

Just a thought.

Jack B.

protogenes

Sep 13th, 2005, 11:45 PM

Ok, we're f**ked.

:cry:

------
http://www.thepsychotichour.com/podcast

Will-Casel

Sep 14th, 2005, 12:21 AM

Ok, we're f**ked.
Don't worry. All podcasts don't have such big numbers.
Here's mine, so the little guys don't feel so bad.
I'm just glad someone's listening!!! :P

From my Web Server Stats:
~460 unique visitors for August
~1430 total visits for August
~46 visitors per day for the month of august

Each episode averages 125 downloads.
Our Feedburner circulation yesterday was 106 with an all-time high of 133.

Will

Hittman

Sep 14th, 2005, 12:29 AM

I usually get about 20k unique visitors a month to the site, occasionally as high as 45k (amazing what a mention on Boing Boing can do for your traffic), but not for podcasts. Thereâ€™s really four different sites under my domain name, all with different styles, designs, and attitudes, and the second hand smoke site draws the most visitors, by far â€“ it pulls in 80-90% of the traffic.

My goal was to have 300 subscribers by episode 12. Last month 450 people downloaded episode 10, so I figure Iâ€™m there. Each of the older episodes gets downloaded two or three times a day, and the number of downloads is inverse to the age of the episode.

I just found something really depressing, though: I looked up the stats for the Podcast Peers site. So far this month itâ€™s had a total of 80 unique visitors, visiting 217 times. The podcast for it has been downloaded a whopping twenty two times, and two of those were test runs I did. Two months ago lots of people here seemed thrilled with the idea, and I keep hoping it will get some momentum, but at the moment, it appears to be dying on the vine.

Art a GoGo

Sep 14th, 2005, 01:15 AM

I posted earlier that I thought it was a FeedBurner link that had stats, but it was actually PodFeed.net's Top 10 http://www.podfeed.net/feedburner_rankings.asp.

We average about 230 subscribers, which is more than I though we would have at this point. Hell, my Mom and Dad get a kick out of the podcast, so I'll only be concerned if we drop below 2 subscribers!

Doug

Barefoot Radio.com

Sep 14th, 2005, 01:34 AM

Howdy folks. This is a very interesting thread.

I feel really encouraged.

I had 1080GB of Data Transfer this last month. However take into account that my shows are each averaging about 36MB now.

I thank everyone for being open on this topic because it's given me some perspective.

vox_monitor

Sep 14th, 2005, 03:30 AM

I'll make it easy.

I'm consistently very disappointed with our numbers.

And I suspect people will be surprised how few downloads we pull.

why so few?

Beats the **** outta me.

www.voxmonitor.com/statistics

see for yourself. anytime.

Oh. And let me mention. In august we got DOS attacked. That's where the huge amount of data we moved came from. We moved a terrabyte in like 8 hours, but it wasn't legit.

comedy4cast

Sep 14th, 2005, 08:35 AM

My history is rather short, but this is what I had in August:

- 3945 unique visitors
- 40571 hits
- 17.98 GB transfer

Episodes appear to get downloaded an average of around 700 times. How many people actually listened to entire episodes is anyone's guess.

The numbes spiked up a bit in July (launch of iTunes).

protogenes

Sep 14th, 2005, 12:37 PM

Our numbers went up 6x after getting listed in iTunes, and have stayed up (and down a bit here and there) ever since.

I guess the real trick now is to make your numbers grow. I find even little things like the show's title make a difference.

Also, posting more show than one helps, but this may not be possible due to hosting space and bandwidth.

:lol:

mesoed

Sep 14th, 2005, 03:07 PM

Maybe someone else can provide the link.

PodFeed.net (http://www.podfeed.net/category_item.asp?id=6) shows the FB count if the podcast has awareness on (MacCast is the example)

PodNova (http://www.podnova.com/index_feedburner_top40.srf) also has a Feedburner Top 40 list and lists a FB rank in their directory.

I've been waiting to see someone use the Feedburner API to show Top X rankings. Very cool. Nice to know that my little local podcast would have been ~30 away from the top 100 last week.

CoffeeGeek

Sep 14th, 2005, 03:50 PM

Mark,

CoffeeGeek is a cool site!

Thanks Jeff! Believe it or not, the site used to be a lot more "hardcore" than it is today... I have a policy in place with the forum moderators that newbies are treated like gold. And the podcast itself is targetted at a very wide audience, with everything from the most basic "move on from tasters choice" stuff to really in depth super geek talk.

Mark

lukeluca

Sep 15th, 2005, 11:44 AM

Wow, I'd be thrilled to have anywhere close to the numbers people here have. We've been posting two 20-30 minute shows a week for the past 11 weeks, and have only seen our FeedBurner circulation top out at 37.

Dennis: I'm 37
King Arthur: What?
Dennis: I'm 37, I'm not old.

We don't really promote ourselves, and average a 25-30 FB circulation. There's probably a lot of podcasts like ours, but you don't hear much from them. We don't have a fancy website, and we don't get any comments from our listeners, but we also don't have commercials or ads or long intros or music bumpers to pad the content out. It's a hobby for us, not a job. Our job is what we do before and after we record. :wink:

If you haven't at least tried listening to us recently, I'd say give us another listen. We don't record at all if the cackling co-workers at the next table are eating, and the editing makes it flow a lot better than the first few episodes. Our recent trip to 7-11 was interesting, and turned out pretty well, considering our equipment.

We should have an interview on The Working Podcast set up pretty soon, that will probably help our circulation, if anyone likes what they hear.

Fil

Sep 15th, 2005, 12:08 PM

Our podcast (I say ours as in Vagusnet.com) has only been going for two weeks (third ep is recorded tonight and tomorrow night).

The first ep is on 256 downloads.
The second is on 165 downloads.

Considering we haven't yet shouted about it too much I'm quietly chuffed.

My target at the moment is for 1,000 regular downloads within the week of release.

phylaxis

Sep 15th, 2005, 04:14 PM

I have always had open stats. You can view my Feedburner subscriber number on my site, currently at ~11,000. Here are my latest stats from Libsyn for the month of August

Stats Start Date: 2005/Aug/01 00:00:21
Stats End Date: 2005/Aug/31 23:59:53
Podcasts Produced (PP): 10
Podcasts Downloaded (PD): 59
Unique IP Addresses (UIP): 57262
Total Downloads (UIPTD): 223651
Total Bytes Served: 4790617346560 - (4461 GB)

I typicaly have total downloads on any one show between 12,000 - 15,000

Personally I just want to say that numbers shouldn't matter really unless you are concerned about making sure you are not going over your bandwidth limit. We all start with 1 subscriber and move on from there. Success for me is measured in the constant improvement of my show and the appreciation of my listeners (be it 1 or 10,000). My listener base seems to grow because of my comitment to my topic and to my show. Also some topics like mine are broader than others and therefore will naturally lend themselves to a wider audiece. The thing to remember is a Commedore 64 fan podcast with 1,000 listeners is fulfilling exactly the same need as a general Tech show with 50,000 listeners.

If you podcast, they will listen.

ferg

Sep 15th, 2005, 06:27 PM

Personally I just want to say that numbers shouldn't matter really unless you are concerned about making sure you are not going over your bandwidth limit. We all start with 1 subscriber and move on from there. Success for me is measured in the constant improvement of my show and the appreciation of my listeners (be it 1 or 10,000). My listener base seems to grow because of my comitment to my topic and to my show. Also some topics like mine are broader than others and therefore will naturally lend themselves to a wider audiece. The thing to remember is a Commedore 64 fan podcast with 1,000 listeners is fulfilling exactly the same need as a general Tech show with 50,000 listeners.

I'm not sure I would agree with you. I don't have any concerns about bandwidth, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't want more listeners. I'm sorry, but having an increasing number of listeners validates what I'm doing. That's not the ONLY thing matters. Liking what I do myself is also important, but there is something in growth. It means that more people are coming (and/or staying) than going. I wouldn't change what I do to get more listeners, but getting more listeners means there are more people out there who appreciate what I'm doing and who "get" us.

jeffoest

Sep 15th, 2005, 06:27 PM

If you podcast, they will listen.

This is VERY true! Even crappy* shows have 10's and sometimes 100's of listeners. AND every single one of us doesn't get some listeners because they are selecting crappier* shows over ours!!

Amazing and pretty cool!

*to me

jeffoest

Sep 15th, 2005, 06:31 PM

I'm not sure I would agree with you. I don't have any concerns about bandwidth, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't want more listeners. I'm sorry, but having an increasing number of listeners validates what I'm doing. That's not the ONLY thing matters. Liking what I do myself is also important, but there is something in growth. It means that more people are coming (and/or staying) than going. I wouldn't change what I do to get more listeners, but getting more listeners means there are more people out there who appreciate what I'm doing and who "get" us.

And Ferg, I kind of agree with you here. If we start consistently seeing lack of growth, I'll probably stop or maybe do something different. It's not a big insult really - it's just an indication that what you are doing is not meeting a need/market.

I think absolute numbers are relative, but growth or lack of it is a strong indication of performance and desirability of your podcast.

(it's kind of nice that growth is easy to accurately measure since all measurements are internally consistent since the same tools are being used for measuring. (comparing apples to apples).

SFEley

Sep 15th, 2005, 07:35 PM

A few thoughts on this (and hopes that PA's server won't flake out again the moment I hit the 'Submit' button):

1.) If you're looking at the PodFeed (http://www.podfeed.net/feedburner_rankings.asp) rankings page, remember that those are only the podcasts who have the Awareness API turned on. There's no way of knowing what percentage of podcasters turned on that option or even know about it. It's probably not a meaningful population. The fact that my show is ranked #15 there does not put me in the 85th percentile of podcasters.

2.) If your own numbers are low by your own reckoning, you'd probably do yourself little good by posting them on your site. If your numbers are high, it may be good marketing to make them public. It isn't logical, but people do want to tune into the shows that they think everyone else is tuning into.

My experience is that people are happy to talk about their numbers if you ask them privately, but it seems to be considered gauche on some level to go on about them in public. Perhaps that's changing; this thread seems to indicate that it is. I happened to be on the Dragon*Con podcasting panel a couple of weeks ago with a lot of excellent podcasters, and somebody at the very end asked what all of our audience sizes were. The panel sort of blinked, but everybody answered. Derek said Skepticality had about 40,000 at the peak of its iTunes rise; Michael & Evo of the Dragon Page had roughly half that; Jason of the Random Signal podcast said a couple hundred. I was the second lowest, behind those guys, Geek Fu, and the Seanachai.

A few months ago I said here that I wasn't going to talk about my numbers publicly until they were over a thousand. (See #2 above.) Well, they're now consistently over that threshold, so here are mine:

Feedburner Circulation: 1189 (as of today)
MP3 File Downloads: 1578 (first week results for the file posted 7 days ago)

That's not spectacular, but I am growing every week. The target I set for myself when I started was that, when my Feedburner count hit 2,000, I'd start to kick some of my marketing and fundraising plans into high gear. It may take a few more months for me to get there, but I'm sticking to my plan.

My other target was to have 20,000 listeners within two years. I think I can do that too. I just have to keep improving every week and work harder at marketing.

phylaxis

Sep 15th, 2005, 08:11 PM

Ferg,
I agree, I guess I didn't distill my point enough or it just came out wrong. The overall point I wanted to make was if you continue to be passionate about your show, work to improve it and keep consistantly putting shows out the listeners will come. I was also trying to illustrate that some audience pools, by their nature, are limited and will. therefore always be smaller proportionately than other audiences. There is a HUGE portion of the world that hasn't even dicovered podcating, so by default audiences will grow no matter what you do.

to further distill:
Keep podcasting and your audience will grow.

spartacusroosevelt

Sep 15th, 2005, 08:31 PM

I am small time.

I don't Feedburn, but just using raw stats I have about 50-70 downloads a week. It's a big 55-60MB weekly show. I had a couple ace months and now it seems like I am leveling off, though still growing. I think I program the best hour of music out here, but shouldn't we all think that. I think I should be huge, but then I realize I had one minimalist show that was an hour and a half that sounded like your air conditioner belt was squealing and a dump truck was pulling in four houses down. Then I am content with the 60.

docsnavely

Sep 16th, 2005, 05:02 AM

Treehonk

Sep 16th, 2005, 09:10 PM

Hi everyone!

Another little guy here, but I wanted to participate. You all have helped us a lot by sharing info, so here goes...

We started at the end of July, and had 55 downloads for the month.

In August we had a total of 660 downloads.

For the first two weeks of September (through the 15th) we have had 2220 downloads.

There are stats on my page that I don't understand. What are the figures for "entry" and Exit"?

I would be happy to share if I was smart enough to understand it!

Thanks,
Randy

audiocollective

Sep 16th, 2005, 11:31 PM

Josh In Japan stats for August:

Unique Visitors: 4800 exact
Hits: 62541
Bandwidth: 96.73 gig (i actually went over my 100gig limit, and had my site shut down for 12 hours) i moved all .mp3's over to libsyn at mid month, but kept all previous episodes on current host)

feedburner: currently at 827 (numbers grew in aug from mid 400's to mid 600's by month's end. i have been steady around mid 700's for the last week or so, and today, i am unable to explain the sudden jump. i was expecting a drop in FB numbers dute to people dropping 4.9 out of their computers)

Unable to explain the sudden jump? This week you have been on the podfinder podcast, had your promo played on Podcastshuffle and been a featured podcast on podcast pickle and The Image Chaos Showâ€¦ that seems like you have had a pretty busy week. That might be a little explanation why your show has exploded. I wish I could pimp my show that well! I like the show and keep up the good work, we are all listening ;-)

kickasspodcast

Sep 17th, 2005, 10:09 AM

Unable to explain the sudden jump? This week you have been on the podfinder podcast, had your promo played on Podcastshuffle and been a featured podcast on podcast pickle and The Image Chaos Showâ€¦ that seems like you have had a pretty busy week. That might be a little explanation why your show has exploded. I wish I could pimp my show that well! I like the show and keep up the good work, we are all listening ;-)

I am happy for josh but who are we kidding?
Nobody listens to podfinder, nobody uses podcastshuffle (gawd is that really what they call it?) and nobody even ever heard of The Image Chaos Show.

I would say its gotta be mainly the Pickle.

Kudos Josh!

You were on podfinder?
http://podfinder.podshow.com/
Where is the link to your show in the show notes?

;)

docsnavely

Sep 17th, 2005, 12:21 PM

ya, Jeff from the shuffle show traded promos with me. he was the only one i expected to hear back from.......

as for podfinder and image chaos, those were two random flukes of nature!

jack..... there's no link jackass hmmmm.. jack from kick *** equals jackass? possibly :twisted:

we all know your feelings with podshow, and i'm with ya..... that's why i was completely shocked when one of my listeners congratulated me..... i was like WTF.....

and the pickleman is one cool dude! see folks, viral advertising does work!

and don't forget my promo also being played by jack in his episode #31!!!

plus PodSqod and I did a reciprocal plug.....

thanks to all those who helped me! if anyone would like me to plug your show..... send it my way!
:wink:

find me a link..... jeeze, it's chapter 13 jack.....***[/i]

Hittman

Sep 17th, 2005, 06:03 PM

Entry and Exit are guesses as to who entered on that page, or left from that page. So if, on my site, I link to a page three links deep in your site, and someone clicks directly to it from my link, it will show as an Entry. If they leave your site from that page, itâ€™s an exit.

In theory. In actual fact it can only be a guess because of the way many of the large ISPs work. If I click from your home page to another page, my IP remains static and the web analyzing software can say â€œHe went from here to there.â€? But ISPs like AOL may request different pages (as well as images and other pieces of pages) from a dozen different servers, with different IPs. So the log analyzer may see one person as a dozen different people bopping around your site.

For similar reasons, the stats on how long people stay at your site are pretty useless. Once a page is sent, thereâ€™s no way to tell how long someone spends looking at it.

A more useful stat is where people are coming from â€“ the links from external pages. That will give you a good idea of who is linking to you and how much traffic those links are generating.

And the more legitimate external links you have, the better your ranking in Google.

haptran

Sep 17th, 2005, 07:49 PM

Wow, I just have thirty people listening to the show... mmm how can I get more people to listen?

Hittman

Sep 18th, 2005, 02:32 PM

For starters, stop telling everyone how much your show sucks.

Seriously, you tell us, on your page, that you hate someone we donâ€™t know and donâ€™t give a **** about, then in the podcast tell us how lame a single person podcast is, but youâ€™re doing one. A few minutes into the show I agreed with you, and stopped listening. (So youâ€™ve got, at most, 29 listeners, not 30.)

Everybodyâ€™s first few shows suck, and we all know that, so donâ€™t belabor the point. Donâ€™t ever put down your own art, whatever it is, because people who were enjoying it, before you questioned their taste, will start agreeing with you. In general, if people have taken the time and effort required to listen, they want to like you. But the first thing you do is tell them why they shouldnâ€™t.

Our improv troupe did two shows this weekend. Last nightâ€™s show went great. There was lotâ€™s of energy and it was funny as hell. But the show we did on Friday, for a college in Long Island â€“ not so much. The first set was pretty good, not great, but pretty good, and the first half of the second set was OK, but the last half sucked. The third from the last game was dull as dirt. The second from the last game was a snoozer. And the last game, which was supposed to be our big finish, blew chunks . We lost our groove, there was no fire, and it was boring. It was the worst show weâ€™ve done in a long time.

We licked our wounds backstage very briefly, (about a minute) then went out for the after show meet â€˜n greet. Some of the audience had stayed behind to tell us how wonderful the show was, how much they enjoyed themselves, and how they hoped weâ€™d be back next year. Do you think we argued with them? â€œNo, it really sucked toward the endâ€¦â€? Hell no, they had a good time, and we werenâ€™t about to talk them out of it.

The Program Director had a better handle on the night, and he blamed the audience. â€œSorry they were so dead toward the end, but theyâ€™ve had a busy day.â€? (It was parentâ€™s weekend.) Good performers never blame the audience (even though, once in a great while, itâ€™s justified), but we didnâ€™t argue with him either. He loved the show, so we took his complement, and his check, without even considering telling him how much we thought we had sucked.

Afterwards, during the long ride home, we examined what worked and what didnâ€™t, something we always do after every show. (We call the process â€œnotes,â€? some troupes call it â€œpost-mortem.â€?) Itâ€™s an important part of improving, but we would never, ever even consider making that a public process. Being self-critical is necessary if youâ€™re ever going to improve (and most of us tend to be overly critical of our own work) but it should be done privately.

No matter what you do, or how good you get at it, some people will tell you that you suck. But if what youâ€™re doing is any good, youâ€™ll develop some fans over time. (Hell, even if it isnâ€™t any good, youâ€™ll get at least some fans.) Unless, of course, you keep telling your fans that you suck. Sooner or later theyâ€™ll agree, and abandon you in favor of someone with some self-confidence.

Reaching for Lucidity

Sep 19th, 2005, 09:52 AM

Wow, some of those numbers are staggering. My show is not that old but I do 5 to 7 a week and thus I am on show #42 as of today.

My FB subs go between 41 and 59, usually in the lower 50's.
I average about 80 show downloads a day across all of my shows.

The numbers are going up, slowly, but up at least.

Hopefully if iTunes ever gets my listing up (6 weeks now) I may get a boost from that.

I now have numbers to shoot for. Always good to have goals.

Insomnia Radio

Sep 19th, 2005, 12:58 PM

comedy4cast

Sep 19th, 2005, 11:15 PM

Showing up late to the party, but here are some #'s for Insomnia Radio.
I'm on Libsyn, so I'm going from their L.E.S.

Subscribers: 4,989
Average Audience: 5,503

Site stats:
Average Unique Visitors Per Day: 175
Average Hits Per Day: 450

Interesting thing is that it takes about a full month for each show to represent those kind of #'s. But my "1st 24 hours" is roughly 1200 downloads.

I"m happy with these #'s. Gratned we all crave more listeners, but if it didn't grow beyond that #, I would be content.

I'm confused. If you get about 1,200 downloads in the first 24 hours, why is your subscriber number 4,989?

I try to ballpark my number of subscribers by saying that most of the subscribers download of a new episode will occur within the first 48 hours. After that, it will be a mix of a few new subscribers and a lot of "samplers".

Insomnia Radio

Sep 20th, 2005, 04:15 AM

protogenes

Sep 20th, 2005, 11:36 AM

No matter what you do, or how good you get at it, some people will tell you that you suck. But if what youâ€™re doing is any good, youâ€™ll develop some fans over time. (Hell, even if it isnâ€™t any good, youâ€™ll get at least some fans.) Unless, of course, you keep telling your fans that you suck. Sooner or later theyâ€™ll agree, and abandon you in favor of someone with some self-confidence.

I'd have to agree here, and this is the strategy we are pursuing with our podcast.

We have now a loyal base of listeners, and this is slowly growing week by week. We believe in our show, and now we are convincing listeners the correctness of that view.

World Domination. Two Ears at a Time.

Modern Living. Simply Too Dull Without The Psychotic Hour
http://www.thepsychotichour.com/podcast

OuterLimits

Sep 22nd, 2005, 12:18 PM

Listeners? bah! How many groupies do ya got? That's the question that matters. And I'm willing to bet that nobody can beat our stock of babes.... n-o-b-o-d-y.

Cheers,
:lol:

jeffoest

Sep 22nd, 2005, 02:24 PM

Listeners? bah! How many groupies do ya got? That's the question that matters. And I'm willing to bet that nobody can beat our stock of babes.... n-o-b-o-d-y.

I agree. Our show gets TONS of hot photo's sent from our female fans. Unfortunately, they are all addressed to Pat. :-(

Treehonk

Oct 1st, 2005, 04:42 AM

In my earlier post I said we had around 2000 downloads thru September 15. We finished September with 7127 downloads. So the second half was way better than the first.

Our show is only two months old so hopefully we will continue to grow for a while...

WildeGeek

Oct 3rd, 2005, 01:12 PM

I think the number of subscriptions you get depends on how geeky your audience is. My outdoorsy audience are, in general, hard to convince to mess with something as geeky as a podcatcher or an RSS reader. Heck, I get people e-mailing me asking if they can subscribe to the show as a snail-mailed CD! Others have asked what radio stations I'm on.

My feedbruner numbers peak around 200 or so mid week. But I see that "circulation" drops to about half of that over weekends.

But that doesn't begin to explain why my web server says I get over 1,000 downloads of each show's MP3 file by the end of a week or so. One show has had almost 2,100 downloads in the three weeks since I posted it.

And all of that is with no overt marketing. I just make sure the show is listed in enough directories that people who are interested can find it.
-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Wildebeat "The audio journal about getting into the wilderness"
Download the MP3 programs or subscribe to the PODcast at...
www.wildebeat.net (http://www.wildebeat.net/)

Wintersheart

Oct 3rd, 2005, 07:58 PM

G'day beautiful peoples,

This is not really a show and tell just some questions on stats looks like a lot of apples and oranges to me.

This is a screen shot of the only stats I have to go by, I have been podcasting 16 days now and I'm on a huge learning curve.

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-6/1039154/stats1.jpg
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-6/1039154/stats2.jpg

* As you can see it all goes by subscribe and you guys are quoting feedburns whats the difference?

* Is everyone quoting daily feedburns, weekly monthly some posts dont even say.

* Whats the difference between a feedburn and a download?

BTW I have no idea how to get stats on downloads and pages hits yet working on it.

Also I would rather people email me and post in my forum then get 40,000 feedburns or what ever a day it just seems all so one sided on the listerners part o well I learn more every day.

Thanks for your time hope you can clear some of it up for me have a fantastical day

-Lynne

WildeGeek

Oct 4th, 2005, 11:47 AM

Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com/) is a way that some of can get agregated stats on RSS reader traffic. I also get some of my stats just by looking directly (or grep-ing) at the logs on my web server.

The stats in your screen shots are very interesting. I would like to know who's providing those stats, and what software they're using. Is your hosting provider doing this for you?

To directly answer your questions:
* As you can see it all goes by subscribe and you guys are quoting feedburns whats the difference?

Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com/) counts subscriptions over a 24 hour period. If the bulk of your audience checks your feed at least once each day, then you get a reasonably accuate measurement. If they check less often, then feedburner under reports your subscriptions -- sometimes, as in my case, by about 5-to-1. So Feedburner results and subscriptions could be the same thing, but it sounds like you're getting better stats.

* Is everyone quoting daily feedburns, weekly monthly some posts dont even say.

See above. Most people using feedburner are quoting daily stats.

* Whats the difference between a feedburn and a download?

A download is when someone surfs to your web site and clicks directly on the link, or surfs to a directory site and clicks on a link, and plays your show. These people hear your show, but aren't listed in subscription statistics, because they aren't using an RSS reader to check your blog/podcast for new shows.

Also I would rather people email me and post in my forum then get 40,000 feedburns or what ever a day it just seems all so one sided on the listerners part o well I learn more every day.

I agree that one listener who's willing to interact and provide feedback and input is worth a hundred or more passive listeners.

notyourusualbollocks

Oct 4th, 2005, 12:25 PM

So 10-20 subscribers would be small, 100-200 subscribers would be respectable, 1000-2000 subscribers would be a player, and 10,000-20,000 subscribers would be a major media outlet.

I think this is a fair assessment. I try and benchmark against the BIG podcasts out there. I think Coverville averages around 7000-9000 subscribers a show. Curry probably has about 20,000.

MK

alvol27

Oct 4th, 2005, 05:01 PM

Yeah, same here, about the parents I mean. My podcast averages about 200 or something a day so I guess mine is in the small percentile. Though, I'm not afraid to tell anybody because I don't do it for numbers anyway. Anyways, I'm still a little new to the podcasting world I guess. I made the first podcast in my town so I'm proud of that.
I do, also, have a question. My podcast aims to be based around participation so I kinda need more listeners. Do you guys have any tips on getting more listeners? It would be very much appreciated.
Thanx to everyone here. This is my first post at Podcast Alley.

alvol27

Oct 4th, 2005, 05:08 PM

I was posting a reply to the one at the bottom of the first page. I didn't realize there were more pages. Sorry everyone!

Wintersheart

Oct 4th, 2005, 06:29 PM

Cool thanks WildeGeek for clearing that up subscribes is a feedburn because I get 10,000 free feedburns a month and every subscribe = - one on that count. If it goes over that I have to pay more.

I actually get to see all the ip adresses of people who subscribe but i didnt post that because of privacy.

My stats are from www.webpasties.com its pretty good.

Thanks so much for your help and taking the time to answer it really cleared things up for me hopefuly clears things up for other newbies as well.

Wonder if some one put that in wiki ;)-

Aslo MK are you talking about per day or all up total?

-Lynne

Hittman

Oct 4th, 2005, 08:15 PM

Download the Behind the Seines podcast about building your listener base for some of the most solid advice on promoting your show without being seen as a spammer.

The question of how many subscribers you have has been discussed endlessly here, because there is no answer. You canâ€™t tell. You can tell how many times your show has been downloaded, and this is the only solid number. (And even that can be funky â€“ if your show is popular on iTunes they may cache it, screwing up your numbers.) Downloads will include subscribers and people who have listened to it directly from your web site. Itâ€™s roughly equilevent to your listeners, although every download isnâ€™t a listen â€“ some people delete shows before listening to them. Iâ€™d suggest scrolling through past threads and reading some of the previous discussions to get a better idea of what to look for.

On the AWStats software, a download of an MP3 file shows up as a page view of that file.

Hits to your XML file mean nothing. Some people automatically check for new shows every couple of hours â€“ that will show up as twelve hits a day in your logs. Some do it once a day. Still others do it a few times a week. I do it about once a week. Because of this, the numbers for your XML files means nada.

For instance, I put a new show up two nights ago. It has been downloaded about 300 times. The XML file, though, has been hit 2500 times. As time goes on, the XML hits will pile up, while the downloads will increase slowly.

Looking at last monthâ€™s stats, I see that both new shows that were posted were downloaded just a little over 400 times each. Iâ€™m guessing about Â¾ of those were subscribers, but thatâ€™s only a guess, based on how many downloads I get in the first few days of a new show. Old shows get downloaded quite a bit too, and about 3000 show files were downloaded. But the RSS feed, the XML file, was â€œviewedâ€ nearly 25,000 times.

Donâ€™t get discouraged by those who claim huge numbers of downloads. Some have earned them by doing great shows on a regular basis over a long period of time. Some donâ€™t understand how to read their stats. And quite a few are lying.

Case in point: Alvol, if youâ€™re web site is the one listed in your profile, youâ€™re misreading your stats. Youâ€™re not getting 200 visitors a day, youâ€™re getting two. Which is fine, everyone has to start somewhere. And visitors <> downloads. (Youâ€™ve also misspelled the link to Podcast Pickle, and there is no RSS feed link anywhere on your site.)

As for feedback, some people get a lot, some get a little, but donâ€™t get discouraged if you donâ€™t get much. I ask for feedback on every show, and get about 1 message per 300 downloads of new shows, and maybe one per 1,000 downloads of old shows. Yet, on this latest one, Iâ€™ve received five messages in the past two days from people who loved it. So itâ€™s a crap shoot. The bottom line is that most people are listening to your show while driving, jogging, at work, etc. where itâ€™s not convenient to send you feedback. I know I intend to send feedback to quite a few shows, but hardly ever get around to it. So if you donâ€™t hear from anyone, that doesnâ€™t mean theyâ€™re not listening to your show and enjoying it.

And last of all, expect your first two or three podcasts to suck. Everybodyâ€™s do. It takes a while to learn the craft. Donâ€™t let that get you down.

alvol27

Oct 5th, 2005, 02:26 PM

Those tips are great and I'll be sure to use them. I'll get to working on my website. Recently, the server that my website is on got messed up so I'm dealing with that. Though, the stats on my webpage aren't affiliated with my RSS stats.
Just thanx for the tips. I hope I can use them to my advantage.

mafew129

Oct 5th, 2005, 07:38 PM

according to my feedburner i have "23 in circulation" is that alot what does that even mean?

SFEley

Oct 5th, 2005, 07:50 PM

according to my feedburner i have "23 in circulation" is that alot what does that even mean?
It means that 23 different software agents (i.e., different programs from different Internet addresses) have checked your podcast feed in a 24-hour period.

WildeGeek

Oct 5th, 2005, 07:50 PM

according to my feedburner i have "23 in circulation" is that alot what does that even mean?

It means that on any given day, 23 people who have an RSS reader or podcatcher software pointed at your site, check your site for updates. It could be the same 23 people every day, or a different 23 people every day.

It doesn't count the number of people who surf to your web site and download the show without using an RSS reader or podcatcher.

As far as whether that's a lot... My show (http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=6425) gets between 175 - 200. The top 18 on PodFeed.Net (http://www.podfeed.net/feedburner_rankings.asp) have feedburner rankings over 1,000.

Hittman

Oct 5th, 2005, 08:14 PM

Does anyone use feedburner and download directly from their site, so they can compare actual downloads to feedburner numbers?

SFEley

Oct 5th, 2005, 08:50 PM

Does anyone use feedburner and download directly from their site, so they can compare actual downloads to feedburner numbers?

Sure, a lot of people do. Or they can use LibSyn and read the numbers correctly (as opposed to what LibSyn presents). Here's what I've seen:

In the last couple of weeks, I've had a Feedburner circulation count around 1200. It peaked at 1285 last week, and of course it dropped below 1000 over the weekend. (Everybody's circulations drop over the weekend. Some people turn off their computers and do stuff.)

My last couple of podcast releases have had a download count of about 1000 on the first day. Figuring on some duplication & such, I can guesstimate that about 80% of the actual feed checkers that day are actually downloading the enclosure. What's interesting is that that corresponds roughly to the number of people using podcatchers (iTunes, iPodder, etc.) as opposed to general aggregators like Bloglines or NewsGator. This would make sense, except that it doesn't even take into account people who just check the site every day. Those folks ought to be in those download totals too. I suspect that somehow, a few people are using podcatchers but not downloading the file automatically. iTunes lets you do that, but I'm surprised that people do.

Over the first week, the download count rises to about 2,000. This makes sense too, both from people wandering by the Web site at their own pace and because not everybody subscribed to the feed checks it every day. Some people only check once a week, and Feedburner doesn't currently have a way to tell you how many. And then the download count continues to trickle up, although not at a significant pace; every file I have gets at least 1 to 5 downloads a day. (The moral there is: don't ever remove content if you can help it.)

So there's my pattern: on the first day, downloads hit around 85% of the Feedburner count. Over the first week it's more like 170%. And that varies from week to week, and the percentages have changed a bit as my listener base has grown.

Even so, with all that variation, I tend to use my Feedburner count as my primary metric for judging growth. Not because it's the most accurate, but because it's a simple metric. It's one number, with a time frame already built into it, and as long as that number gets a little bigger each week, I can easily conclude that I have more listeners than I did before.

Wintersheart

Oct 6th, 2005, 12:22 AM

Thanks Hittman,

Well that was a reality check lol feedburns means craplo you should go by downloads.

I was lucky enough to be on a server that runs plesk and its been running since day one , there is a log which I can track and even filter out ip address's that are duplicates.

So here is my downloads for 18 days without duplicates using filter

no. reqs first time last time file
1 210 18/Sep/05 18:56 5/Oct/05 02:09 /ldplanet/ldplanet1.mp3
2 100 25/Sep/05 00:52 4/Oct/05 23:28 /ldplanet/ldplanet2.mp3
3 138 30/Sep/05 23:49 5/Oct/05 00:03 /ldplanet/ldplanet3.mp3
4 42 30/Sep/05 00:20 5/Oct/05 00:00 /ldplanet/ldplanetpromo.mp3

Subscribes/ Feedburns 2971 for 18 days

Well at least it makes you think but generally more activity with feed burns still is a good indicator of growth .

Hope that helps some thanks everyone ;)

-Lynne

SFEley

Oct 6th, 2005, 09:32 AM

Subscribes/ Feedburns 2971 for 18 days

One point of clarification here: "feedburns" is not a generic term. There is a specific commercial site called Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com) that many podcasters use for statistics and some RSS enhancements. When we talk about "Feedburner circulation" we're talking about numbers we got from that site. No one uses their name as a general noun.

Otherwise it sounds like you're pretty on track with what you're doing.

feastoffools

Oct 10th, 2005, 12:28 PM

Too many podcasters are OBSESSED with their numbers. I call feedburner stats that "Am I famous yet?" meter.

The sad thing is a lot of these people won't spend 10 minutes planning what they are going to say or do on their own show, but every single time they talk to me the SECOND question to come out of their mouths is "how many people listen to your show"?

It reminds me of gay men in chat rooms asking you for the size of your genitals.

at this point in time, it doesnt matter how many, but WHO is listening. Enjoy your fans, these are the people who are your "base". They are your peeps. Nurture them. Even if it's 3 people, and one of them is your mom. make them part of your permanent VIP list.

For me, the joy of podcasting is in meeting interesting people and sharing information. And talking trash about celebrities!

SFEley

Oct 10th, 2005, 01:28 PM

at this point in time, it doesnt matter how many, but WHO is listening. Enjoy your fans, these are the people who are your "base". They are your peeps. Nurture them. Even if it's 3 people, and one of them is your mom. make them part of your permanent VIP list.
What this misses, Feat, is that there's more than one reason to podcast.

If you're podcasting as a hobby -- to entertain yourself, or to talk about your life and thoughts to whomever's interested -- then you're absolutely right. Having a sizable audience can be a great ego boost, but the "success" of your podcast isn't wrapped up in it. It's all about whether you're Having Fun, and you can do that just as well with five people as you can with five thousand.

If, on the other hand, you're podcasting to advance a cause or deliver a message, then the number of people you're reaching does matter to your goal. You're more successful at changing the world if more of the world hears you. That doesn't mean you have to take yourself too seriously, or obsess on it, or be a jerk to other podcasters; but there are good reasons for numbers to matter.

(I won't even touch the whole "making money" thing -- that can be a very interesting side effect of some podcasts, but if it's your goal you've probably picked the wrong activity.)