Does Adding a Streaming Option Cut Down on Subscribers

[cybercooler]

I was talking with another podcaster and he mentioned how his subscribers had slightly leveled off. He said he noticed this after he put streaming options on his site (so a person didn't have to download the mp3 file).

I thought this was an interesting thought. By making it easier for a person to listen to your show on your site, do you thikn you may be costing yourself subscribers?

Your thoughts....

[conradslater]

This issue an issue which bothers me - not such because of streaming but simple click-thru.

Until recently I was annoyed by the bandwidth I was eating up but low stats on my feedburner circulation. I dealt with this by creating a page for each epissode of my show (it's a vidcast by the way) and embedding the media file. i also slapped a counter on those page.

The result - I discovered I'm getting twice as many people watching my show on the site than through the feed. As far as I'm concerned this is bad news because it means I'm not getting the traffic through itunes and will probably remain low on their charts etc.

While of course I'm delighted there are people watching - at all - I would prefer to know they were coming back each week and that they understood the point of podcasting.

[Steev]

I don't think it really matters. The main thing is that people are listening to your show. The easier you make it for people to do that, the better. Some people will just never subscribe anyway, and why not cater to them too?

[mongrel]

I give my users the option to do both, in part because I REALLY love the two WordPress Plugins I discovered. They look cool and work well. check them out at:

http://www.thedial.net/html/modules/wordpress/?style=w

Using Webalizer, I have a pretty good idea of how many people listen to my podcast. Most of the people come to my show through direct or guerilla marketing anyway. If they subscribe though iTunes, great. If not, great. The big thing for my listeners is to be able to click through my shownotes to get more information about the bands and venues anyway, so listening through my WordPress page makes sense.

[Cali]

Yeah, there will be people who won't subscribe, and maybe your content caters more to the type of person who would want to watch it straight from the site. Not that you should change your content, it just might be one of those weird things. Have you tried specifically asking your listeners to subscribe?

[mongrel]

I actually do ask them verbally and in-text to subscribe through iTunes and provide every opportunity for them to do so. I do this more because people are familiar with iTunes even if they aren't familiar with podcasting. By visiting my page and seeing the friendly, familiar iTunes logo, listeners ascribe a level of legitimacy to my show that they might otherwise not.

It makes me look Big and Important--"look, I have a listing at iTunes; my show must be a-ok." This is based on the assumption that credibility is contagious. Is this important? It won't be for long, but I have had more than one listener tell me that they had never heard of podcasts, and my link to iTunes made it easy to get into the new medium. I have to believe that the iconization of the American attention-span can work in my favor from time to time.

I find, in my short tenure as a podcaster, that continual, regular marketing is what keeps people coming back to my show whether through iTunes or online. Until I develop what I'd call a strong following, I think gentle reminders will be required no matter what.

[Ordinary Average Guy]

I give my users the option to do both, in part because I REALLY love the two WordPress Plugins I discovered. They look cool and work well. check them out at:

http://www.thedial.net/html/modules/wordpress/?style=w

Okay, it looks great! Wanna share with us the name of the plugins?

Using Webalizer, I have a pretty good idea of how many people listen to my podcast.

I'm curious as to how you determine this, since I use Webalizer too and am never sure what it all means in regards to podcasting.

[mongrel]

I give my users the option to do both, in part because I REALLY love the two WordPress Plugins I discovered. They look cool and work well. check them out at:

http://www.thedial.net/html/modules/wordpress/?style=w

Okay, it looks great! Wanna share with us the name of the plugins?

Using Webalizer, I have a pretty good idea of how many people listen to my podcast.

I'm curious as to how you determine this, since I use Webalizer too and am never sure what it all means in regards to podcasting.

The madness/method I use is to go to my Webalizer stats, find the file name of the podcast in question, and divide the number of KB of bandwidth spent on that file by the number of KB of the mp3 file. While this is not an exact method, one interesting thing it allows is to compare the number of file hits to the amount of KB of bandwidth used. I note that with the number of hits I get, my bandwidth usage should be higher. This could mean that listeners are not listening to the whole show. Which would probably mean I'm not interesting enough to justify doing a whole hour. But it does give me a pretty good idea of the DL rate of a given show.

If someone finds a flaw in this logic, or a better way to use Webalyzer, please let me know.

The WordPress plug-ins I'm using: ( see them in use on my site (http://www.thedial.net/html/modules/wordpress/?style=w) )

Audio Player (http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/) : donationware
this is the one in the body of my post. Very simple and straightforward to use. Documentation clear. Can be set to auto-play or not.

XSPF Player (http://www.boriel.com/?page_id=12): donationware
This is the plug-in on the top of the right-hand side bar. Reasonably simple to figure out. Takes some playing around to get it the way you want it and requires willingness to go into your WordPress template files if you want to get a custom fit in a side bar. The author (a great guy)has put out a request to help him write documentation. He has put a support forum on his site that is pretty active.

and the plug-in I haven't had time to figure out, WP-iPodCatter, (http://garrickvanburen.com/wpipodcatter/) allegedly creates valid feeds for the iTunes podcast directory. It probably does, but I haven't succeeded at that yet.

There are a number of other interesting plug-ins at:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins