Don’t confuse “listeners” with “downloaders”

"How do I grow my show?"

This is the question we hear most often from podcasters. It makes intuitive sense, as discoverability is one of the biggest challenges podcasters, regardless of size, face. Everyone wants a larger audience.

However, we believe the first podcast growth question you should ask is:

"How do I know if my show is growing?"

Successful growth in podcasting means increasing the number of people who fall in love with your show. These people become regular listeners, followers of your podcast and spread the word to others. In other words, they become fans. By cultivating fans one at a time, you can achieve sustainable and long-term growth. When assessing the success of a show, we look for signals of such growth.

The “listener” is the key metric in the success of that podcast. Listeners stand in the center of podcast success. Those are real people in the world that we are hoping to become fans.

However, the podcast industry uses the word "listener" to mean very different things. There's no consensus about what this seemingly-simple word actually means.

So why can't we even agree on the definition of a listener?

Most podcast hosting platforms provide listener numbers in addition to download data. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) even has a standard definition for the term “listener“.

However, it is important to note that the “listeners” or “unique listeners” numbers provided by hosting platforms do not measure the number of people who have actually listened to an episode of your show. Instead, you get a count of unique IP addresses and user-agent strings that have downloaded – not necessarily listened to – your podcast. 

So when podcast hosting companies talk about “listeners,” they’re almost always talking about “downloaders”. 

Podcast downloads often don’t lead to anyone listening since many podcast listening apps (including Apple Podcasts) automatically download certain episodes when they are released. This is convenient for podcast fans but causes a measurement challenge for us. 

We want to know how many unique individuals have actually hit play on a podcast. For the purpose of this post and to avoid confusion with the IAB definition of a listener I will call this number “verified listener”. 

Why is all this important?

Bumper's clients seek to increase the success of their shows. As Dan explained in our recent blog post about the XY problem in podcast audience growth, downloads aren’t the only measure of success. Instead, verified listeners (combined with Listen Time) provide us with a better understanding of podcast success. We want to determine how many people have actually listened to a show and how long they've listened to each episode.

Growth is only possible with accurate measurement. We need to know what tactics and editorial decisions have yielded results in order to make sure we make smart decisions about our podcast in the future. Only when we have accurate data are we able to come up with growth plans that can make a meaningful difference.

Getting the data on real listening behaviour, including verified listeners and Listen Time, is a key prerequisite for us to make impactful recommendations to our clients around how they can grow their shows.

Where can I find accurate listener data?

Given the distributed nature of podcasting, our best sources of data for verified listeners are the podcast listening apps themselves. Only they know how many people actually hit play on any episode and for how long those listeners have stayed with any episode.

Luckily, we can get this data from podcast listening apps, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Podcasters have to gather that data manually and combine it with all other relevant podcast performance data in order to have a meaningful overview of how the podcast is performing.

We have been doing this data aggregation for clients for a long time and were never fully satisfied with how we are able to identify growth patterns. For that reason Bumper is building an automated dashboard that automatically imports consumption, and download data from a number of sources. This allows our clients to see data such as verified listeners, listen time, downloads, followers and marketing attribution data and all in one place. More on that soon.