Do your download numbers *really* represent your audience?
Vol. 52 - Dan Misener addresses the mess that is podcast measurement, Kattie find her haters on Facebook, and Sonar Soundlabs rebrands.
Hihi!! Happy Pod the North Tuesday, and hello from DC!
I’m at Podcast Movement this week, are you?? If so, let’s find each other somewhere in this gigantic conference complex. OR, if you’re not in DC but want to stay up-to-date about what’s going on here, now is the time to let me know what you’d love me to keep and eye on. I’ll be posting to my Instagram stories all week!
Either way, shoot me an email or DM!
In this issue:
Help, my podcast is on Facebook!
Dan Misener is seeking the truth of podcast audiences.
Canadian Indie: Do You Watch Anime?
True North Podcast Feature: Teachings in the Air
BTW:
There are currently 31 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 29 First Nations communities across Canada. The last lifted advisory was June 2024. The most recent added advisory was July 2024.
Help, my podcast is on Facebook!
Yesterday I accidentally swiped onto a clip from my podcast on Facebook reels and let me tell you, it was quite the exercise in humility.
We all know Facebook is a lawless land that most of us are migrating away from anyway. So when I suddenly found my self staring at my own face, and that of talented comedian, Maddy Foley, in a video reposted by a Hamilton-based community page, it was certainly a trip — especially since, despite my TikTok being credited in the caption, I’d never actually given this Facebook Page permission to use it.
No biggie! The podcast was getting shared and that’s exciting — especially those like, share, and comment numbers!
But then I made the mistake of reading the over 150 comments on the video, and had to take a hit of my inhaler. A number of viewers were NOT loving my content. WOOF.
The negativity on the post made me think about the impact that a podcast clip can have online when it’s posted with little to no context — or even with context.
Reposting short-form videos is very normal in the current social media landscape. But how much good does it actually do for podcasters when many social media users have stopped seeing the humanity in creators? I can’t help but wonder if those commenters ever thought I’d actually be seeing what they wrote.
Responding to some of the comments was cathartic, but futile. In reality, most social media users aren’t clicking the link or typing in the name of the podcast to learn more about what they just watched. They’re watching the video, leaving their comment, and swiping on to the next.
In in the current reality of creating a “show” (which I get into more with Dan Misener below), podcasters should be armed and ready for backlash not just in 1-star ratings, but across the digital landscape. That’s A LOT to come to terms with, especially as an indie creator.
Despite the hate, luckily the majority of commenters did seem to grasp the context of the video, and it was really exciting to see the dialogue the that podcast had started and that it was aligned with the nature of the show. But all of this is to say that that the relationship between podcasters and social media is certainly more complex than it just being a marketing tool.
I’d be curious to hear how you’re thinking about social media and the communities you’re building there — whether you intend to or not!
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Thoughts from the ecosystem:
Dan Misener is seeking the truth of podcast audiences.
If you’ve been following Pod the North this summer, you’ll know that I recently made a career change from working as a Freelance Podcast Producer to working as a Podcast Growth Specialist at Bumper, a data-drive podcast growth agency co-founded by Jonas Woost and Dan Misener.
Joining the Bumper team has been pretty freaking exciting. A number of folks across the industry have been asking me about how my new gig is going and there are so many great things I could say. But to avoid a sales pitch, the long and short of it is that it’s been kind of unbelievable to be working so closely alongside what I’ll call '“podcast geniuses”. Especially when they’re all so incredibly kind and cool.
One such genius is Dan Misener – who is likely uncomfortable reading that label right now, but it’s true. Dan’s earliest work in the audio space was in campus community radio at CKDU in Halifax. That’s where he told me he fell in love with “DIY media”. Then, for about 13 years he and his wife, Jenna, ran a beloved, live stage show and podcast-turned-radio program called Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids, which started in the backroom of a bar and grew to a cross-country tour. For a while, Dan worked as a producer at CBC radio and he told me that that’s where his deep interest in audience analytics began.
“On the radio, there's always the sense that maybe there's an audience out there somewhere, but we didn't really know who was out there, we didn't know how many people were out there. We never really knew, in a direct way, whether the stuff that we were making was actually engaging people,” Dan told me when I spoke to him for Pod the North a couple weeks ago.
“When I started working in podcasting, I had a similar frustration. You publish an episode, you log into your hosting provider, you see a bunch of downloads, but that doesn't tell you much of anything other than somebody asked for a file and they maybe got the file and maybe it's on their phone. Several years ago, when we started to get better information in podcasting – when Apple started to report on time spent listening – we started to get that feedback loop. That was intoxicating – partly as somebody who's interested in marketing, but also just from the standpoint of a creator. I just fell in love with this idea that creative people can do better work when they listen to what the audience is telling them; not when they write in, not when they respond on social, not when they leave a comment on a website or a review in a podcast app. Creators can make better stuff by listening to what listeners are saying when they vote with their play buttons.”
Now that podcasters have all these amazing analytics to work with, they’re bound to make incredible shows and foster massive audiences, right?
Well, it turns out it’s not the case. Instead, podcasters are finding themselves toggling between browser tabs, half-hazzardly calculating averages in Google Sheets, or even worse, just ignoring their anaylitics all together — and I’m not just talking about myself. But last week, Bumper announced the launch of the Bumper Dashboard, a tool that aggregates all the most important metrics from across the wide variety of podcast platforms like Apple, Spotify and even YouTube, to give podcasters the best idea of the state of their show all in one place.
Dan’s already been busy hitting the feeds ahead of Podcast Movement discussing the Dashboard and the ongoing frustration that is podcast measurement. Podnews’ James Cridland even got a chance to check it out and shared what he learned about Podnews podcasts via the Bumper Dashboard.
But I thought this was the perfect time to talk-shop with Dan and have a digestiable, nerdy conversation about podcast analytics here on Pod the North. We discussed the types of measurement metrics that actually mean the most to podcasters, how to use them, and I got Dan’s insights on the kinds of things that have been impacting podcast analytics, like last years iOS 17 update.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Paid subscribers of Pod the North can listen to the entire conversation later this week!
Kattie Laur: One thing you and I talk about a lot is how downloads aren't the best way to measure your success. For somebody who's never heard that before, please explain!
Dan Misener: I think downloads matter – and downloads for a long time were one of the only ways that it was possible to measure podcast success! But the download is a pretty crude measure. My phone downloads many episodes, often in the middle of the night, and I never listen to those episodes.
If your lens on podcast success is downloads, you're really just measuring how many files were transferred – how many people's devices asked for an MP3 file and received an MP3 file.
That doesn't tell you much at all about whether they played it, whether it sat on their device unlistened for months or years. It doesn't tell you whether they spent any time with you and your voice or your guests or your stories. It doesn't tell you much about whether they liked what they heard.
I'm not saying that downloads are bad and I'm not saying we shouldn't pay attention to downloads, but downloads don't tell the whole story. In the mid 2020s, we now have so many better additional signals that can measure things like ‘time spent listening’, which is a wonderful measure of whether you've earned people's time and attention. We can measure what we would call ‘verified listeners’ - it's the closest we've got to measuring people.
So downloads remain important, they tend to be the unit of measure for ad based transactions and ad sales. But for creators and for publishers and for brands in the space and for advertisers in the space, I'm way more interested in how many people listened or watched. I'm less interested in how many MP3 files that represents.
KL: I actually had a conversation with my pal, Erin Hynes, the host and my co-producer on Curious Tourism. I did some digging into the shows metrics and looked at our [episodes] with the most ‘verified listeners’ and compared it with the episodes with the top ‘consumption rates’.
Our show, a responsible travel podcast, we assumed our audience was generally travelers who care about traveling in a responsible way. But with ‘verified listeners’, we found the episode titles that were hooking people the most, and the top ‘consumption rates’, where maybe the title hooked somebody but the actual content wasn't that interesting. We actually figured out that a lot of our listeners seem to be people who are into travel content creation!
I think this is such a great example of using metrics outside of downloads.
DM: I think one of my favorite examples of this is understanding the true size of your audience and how powerful that can be when your business includes things beyond the podcast.
So at Bumper, we work with a number of clients who, in addition to having podcasts, sell courses or sell books or have software products that they want you to pay for, who have revenue sources including Patreon or paid subscriptions. We work with people who do live events and need to book venues for live events. Often when we show people the difference between downloads and people, which is often is often surprising, I think it's a whole lot closer to the truth.
That's maybe disappointing if you thought that you had 10 times as many listeners as you really do, but how useful is that when you go to book your tour? How useful is that when you think about your conversion rate from a free listener to a paid subscribing listener?
It can be really easy when you think the denominator is much larger than it really is to feel bad. We had 10,000 downloads last week and we only sold one course. What's wrong with us? Well, one outta 10,000 feels pretty miserable. But if your audience size was really closer to a thousand, hey, I'll take one in a thousand.
Not to mention the definition of a download keeps changing. The IAB, which sets the guidelines for this, regularly releases new versions of their guidelines. They only become more conservative in that they filter out more stuff. So the number only really ever gets smaller with subsequent revisions of the IAB standards.
We also have things like Apple Podcasts, the listening app. iOS 17 made a very significant change to how automatic downloads work, and I think a lot of podcasters, big enterprise podcasters and independent podcasters, felt that decline.
KL: So give me the rundown on the Bumper Dashboard!
DM: We're really excited about the Bumper dashboard! We've been using it internally at Bumper for the last two years and we've found it incredibly useful.
We kept seeing that there was all of this really useful information, actionable information from a marketing standpoint, from an editorial standpoint, but people weren't using it. It was heartbreaking to know that this information existed – this actionable, useful intelligence existed – but people were not using it, partly because sometimes it's hard to access, and partly because it's not all in one place. I don't want to have to check five, six, seven different dashboards to get a sense of the well-being or health of my show.
So the Bumper Dashboard was really meant to scratch our own itch, to be a tool that we could use internally at Bumper and share with our clients, to help them see the bigger picture and to touch more parts of the elephant.
KL: We were actually in a client meeting and giving them an early access look at the Dashboard and they were like, ‘I've basically had this for years but an Excel spreadsheet’ that they've been manually updating.
And I so relate to that because that is exactly what I had for the longest time – this stupid spreadsheet where I was trying to track all of these metrics, and figure out what they even mean in the first place and why they're relevant.
DM: It’s a really common response to the fragmentation or the hassle factor of all of these dashboards. A lovingly handcrafted spreadsheet in Google sheets or Excel or some other tool, but that's a pain in the neck to maintain.
I think it's error prone, because if you're copying and pasting stuff out of CSVs that you've downloaded from a dashboard, your finger's going to slip sometime, and on top of that, platforms don't use the same language as each other. Spotify talks about starts and streams. Apple talks about listeners and plays. Apple and Spotify both talk about average consumption or average listen, but they mean different things by those terms. There's this big soup of words that are not well defined across platforms. And I think one of the challenges with a lovingly handcrafted spreadsheet is, you end up adding things together that maybe shouldn't be added together, or you end up adding things that are really not equivalent units.
The classic example here is downloads plus YouTube views. Those are not the same thing, and it can be dangerous to add stuff together that maybe shouldn't be added together.
KL: You mentioned the iOS 17 update – this is old news, but I wanted to ask you about it anyway because I think this is a story that not a lot of indie podcasters are still familiar with. Are you able to give me a rundown on why that impacted podcasts so much?
DM: It's maybe the single biggest frequently asked question that we've had at Bumper over the last year or so, since iOS 17 came out in late 2023.
My understanding is that Apple with iOS 17 changed the mechanics of how their automatic downloads work by default. If I follow a show in Apple podcasts, my phone will automatically download new episodes as they are released. If I don't listen to enough of the episodes that my phone has downloaded, if a bunch of episodes pile up on my phone, my phone will eventually stop auto downloading new episodes, which is good. It is by design.
KL: So you can still take pictures on your phone and you’ve still got storage on there.
DM: And I think Apple frames this as a storage saving feature. Great. Wonderful.
With iOS17, what Apple changed was what happens after a listener has gone dark. Meaning their device has stopped automatically downloading new episodes. That's what they changed.
So if I hit follow on Canardian, my phone was automatically downloading all the new episodes and I was listening to them diligently and then maybe I stopped for some reason or another – let's say I went on a three week camping trip into the middle of the wilderness, I had no connectivity, no wifi, no cell connection, no nothing – for Canardian, I go dark. My phone just stops downloading new episodes. The thing that Apple changed is what happens when I hit play on the episode after my camping trip.
Before iOS17, if I hit play on an episode after going dark, after not having listened for a while and after my phone had paused automatic downloads, what would happen is Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. A whole bunch of downloads. It would essentially catch me up on all of the episodes that I had missed in the time while I was dark, and my phone would automatically download those episodes.
Apple changed what happens when somebody comes back from having gone dark. Now you get the most recently released episode or the next episode that you should be listening to without that large flurry of downloads of everything that you missed in the interim. That's my understanding of what has changed. And various podcasters were impacted differently. The factors that went into how much you felt this change include; what is your release cadence? What is the depth of your back catalog? What's the percentage of your active listeners who are using Apple Podcasts?
One of the most common questions we got as all of this played out was, ‘what are other podcasters seeing?’ And there wasn't a really good answer to that, because everyone felt it differently. I wish I could say everybody had a 10 percent decline or a 20 percent decline or a 2 percent decline, but it was really different depending on all of those factors that I mentioned.
KL: So now we have a new update coming in the fall. Any concerns for you there?
DM: I would hope that if there was another significant change to how Apple handles downloads, automatic downloads, or otherwise, that the team at Apple would be very communicative with the entire ecosystem.
And I'm not going to pretend that I think auto downloads will continue forever. At some point, maybe they go away. If that happens, and if Apple has a role in that, my very strong hope is that they would share those details earlier, more publicly with a larger group of people because there's quite a lot of worry, concern, and frankly, bad information floating around.
KL: As a metrics man looking at the podcast landscape, what would you strongly advise podcasters do to better their how, and strongly advise against?
DM: I would say that especially early on in the life of the show, as you're figuring out your format, your structure, things like duration; how long are my episodes gonna be? Do I do a rapid fire question segment? Is that at the beginning? Is that at the end? Do we take a break? Where should the ads be? All of those show structure questions, you can make your best guess at the time but if you're not paying attention to what the audience is saying to you when they vote with their play buttons - how long they listen, where they drop off, what they skip over, what they skip forward to – I think that's a mistake.
I am not advocating to only do things that the data suggests you should do. I am not suggesting that we want data driven editorial decisions. I trust that human beings are smart and I trust that people who make podcasts know their own voice and know what they want to put out into the world. I trust all of that. I want human editorial judgment informed by data, not human editorial judgment trumped by what the downloads tell us we should do. That would be the thing to avoid and a strong recommendation of something to do.
KL: What do you see coming in the industry over the next year?
DM: I hope that old people like me who have been doing this work for decades now can shed the traditionalist mindset around what a podcast is or what a podcast should be.
I think about that when I think about all the survey work that's been done around younger, less tenured podcast listeners and where they find shows, where they spend time with shows that has shifted, largely to Spotify and to YouTube and to social platforms, as well as a form of discovery.
We as an industry have these traditional, longstanding, sometimes very firmly held beliefs about what counts as a podcast and what doesn't count as a podcast, and I'm going to suggest that none of that matters. It's ‘what does the audience consider a podcast?’, and how can we meet them where they live? How can we make stuff that is worth their time and attention such that they come back again for another episode, maybe for another year, maybe for another 10 years.
I'm a big believer in something that Tom Webster talks about this idea of moving away from a rigid definition of a podcast as a bunch of audiophiles with an RSS feed that you can zoom through a podcast player. That feels kind of outmoded. Tom, in a lot of his writing, advocates for ‘make a show’. And that resonates so strongly with me.
To bring it back to Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids; it was a podcast. It was a live event series. We had a bunch of social accounts where we posted videos of people reading diaries from their teenage years and letters from camp. We posted a bunch of videos. We posted a bunch of audio files onto YouTube as videos, and we posted videos that included video cameras in their production. I think of Grownup Street Things They Wrote As Kids, not as a podcast, but as a show.
I like to think about a show with many different expressions of that show, and opportunities for people to come in through the social on ramp and then find the audio podcast or not. That's totally fine. I'm totally fine if you come to a live event and never listen.None of those are wrong ways to use the show.
What Dan is loving:
Check out this Canadian Indie: Do You Watch Anime?
A deep dive into the best anime out there.
Adam Corky asks a variety of guests about their favourite anime, and what is is about the genre that’s so special to them. The craziness devolves from there!
True North Podcast Feature: Teachings in the Air
An Indigenous Health and Wellness Podcast.
Uncle Gerry Oldman, aka Saa Hiil Thut, makes sure he approaches everything with intention. On the podcat, he shares stories about how he started doing ceremony, the importance of indigenous soul food — sharing his earliest memories of food including his first A&W burger— what podcasting means to him, and so much more.
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Listen to Pod the North’s flagship podcast, Canardian, and rate it five stars!
What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:
New Releases:
June 22, 2024 — Visit the library of memories with Pages Past, a new podcast from Genna Buck. Each episode guests choose a book to read and discuss. The only rule is that the book must have once meant a lot to them — so long ago that they were a different person the last time they read it.
Aug 6, 2024 — Canadaland has announced it’s first celebrity interview podcast: The Worst Podcast. Join award-winning filmmaker and noted curmudgeon Alan Zweig — who doesn’t know (or care) much about his guests — through real conversations that dig deep and get to the worst things: nagging fears, embarrassing secrets and haunting regrets. The first episode launches September 4th. OH, and stay tuned for some cameos from yours truly! ;)
Aug 7, 2024 — You’ll Never Make It is a new podcast about chasing your dreams, from Joseph DeBenedictis and JUNO nominated producer, Ross Hayes Citrullo. Joseph's dream is to have his own TV show and Ross’s is for his band to make it big. Whether you're an aspiring actor, comedian, musician, filmmaker, or any type of creative navigating the ups and downs of the entertainment world, the show offers inspiration, motivation, and hope in the pursuit of turning dreams into reality.
Aug 31, 2024 — The CJN's is launching its first original audio drama, Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story. The seven-part fiction series follows the story of a young Canadian woman who finds herself thrust into a geopolitical crisis when she happens to be in Berlin while Holocaust victims are rising from the mass graves of concentration camps as zombies. Catch the trailer now!
You should know…
Sonar Soundlabs relaunches with a fresh focus on arts & culture podcasting in partnership with My Most Authentic Life. The alliance positions both companies to create high-quality, authentic podcast partnerships that intentionally connect brands with their audiences. Soundlabs services include podcast production, artwork and logo Design, theme song and music production, and a ton more!
Daniel Baptista, Host and Producer of The Movie Podcast, has been welcomed into the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television! Congratulations!
CBC’s Ann MacKeigan is moving on from her role as Executive Producer on Q with Tom Power and Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud to a new assignment that’s yet to be announced. In a LinkedIn announcement she shared that it is “the right time” to hand over the role “the next generation”. CBC is now on the hunt for these shows’ next EP!
Finally, Pocket Casts is adding the ability to rate podcasts to the next version of its iOS app. Listeners will need to listen to at least two episodes to leave a rating.
Events:
Aug 27, 2024 — Don’t miss this webinar from the IAB, “Podcasting in the Creator Economy: Where Influence Drives Purpose”. The webinar is set to include panelists from podcast marketing giants, SiriusXM and BetterHelp. This should be a fascinating workshop for anyone curious about the relationship between podcasting and influencers.
Aug 31, 2024 — The aformentioned Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story will be hosting an immersive in-person audio experience with free live reading of the show. Live actors are set to perform scenes with sound effects, followed by a conversation with creators Michael Fraiman (director of podcasts, The CJN) and Max Ackerman (artistic director, Dandelion Theatre) about the show’s origins and intentions as an innovative piece of Holocaust education designed for the digital age.
Sep 7, 2024 — The Globe and Mail’s In Her Defence: 50th Street will be LIVE in London, England as a part of the London Podcast Festival. If you find yourself in the UK in early September, don’t miss it!
Just Joe (rudely awoken and dirty as heck)…
Thanks for supporting Pod the North, I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!
Kattie
@Podkatt (Twitter, Spotify, and Goodpods) | @PodtheNorth (Bluesky and Instagram)
