Introducing

The Bumper Score

Verify your audience. Attract more advertisers.

Advertisers want to increase their investment into podcasting — but they need to see better data. Downloads simply don’t tell the full story.

The Bumper Score represents how well your show delivers ads to a real, verified audience. It confirms that you have an engaged audience worth investment.

Free to all podcasters, the Bumper Score launches in May 2026.

Join the waitlist now!

The opportunity

How can we get more ad dollars into podcasting?

Every day, podcast ads reach millions of people — but advertisers have almost no way to prove it. "How many people heard my ad?" is remarkably difficult to answer thanks to fragmented consumption and a currency based primarily on downloads.

Oxford Road's 2025 research found that better data could unlock another $1B for the industry. Audience verification leads to increased trust, confidence, and investment in podcasting.

Read more about why we launched the Bumper score.

What is the Bumper Score

Audience verification for podcast ads

The Bumper Score represents a podcast's ability to deliver ads to a verifiable audience. The higher the score, the more confidence advertisers have that their ads reach real listeners.

Every participating podcast receives a score from 0 to 200, benchmarked against the average. A score of 100 means a show is performing at par — anything higher signals a stronger ability to reach a verifiable audience.

Got questions? Get in touch or find our FAQs.

Verified audience

Confirmed real audiences from major podcast apps and platforms.

How we calculate the Bumper Score

Built on first-party data from trusted sources

The Bumper Score answers one question: how well does a show deliver ads to a verified audience? It's calculated automatically from three data inputs.

Podcast delivery data

From your hosting provider, reflecting how your episodes are served.

Bumper aggregates and calculates all of this at scale. Podcasters simply sign up, grant access to relevant data sources, and Bumper handles all calculations and verifications automatically.

Episode-level retention

How much of each episode listeners actually hear, including your ads.

Data ownership

Empowerment, transparency & control

Your Bumper Score belongs to the publisher. Bumper never shares any show's score without explicit permission from its owner.

Your score, your data

Each podcast's individual score belongs to its publisher. Full stop.

You decide what to share

Advertisers and agencies may ask for your score — it's always your call what to share and how.

You're in control

Podcasters fully control how they utilize their Bumper Score in conversations with buyers.

Launching in May 2026, the Bumper Score is free for all podcasters.

Join the waitlist now to get priority access:

Bumper Score FAQs

  • The Bumper Score represents how well your show delivers ads to a verified audience.

    Every participating podcast receives a score from 0 to 200, benchmarked against the average.

    The higher the score, the more confidence advertisers have that their ads reach real listeners.

  • We want to see more investment into podcasting. Given the audiences that we reach, we should see more ad dollars coming into the industry.

    Over an extensive research period we learned that better data can enable a significant increase in investment into our industry.

    Audience verification is a key piece of unlocking the next growth phase in podcasting and the Bumper Score aims to help with this.

  • Any podcasters can get their free Bumper Score as long as they host their show with one of the following providers:

    • Simplecast

    • Megaphone

    • OmnyStudio

    • Acast

    We will add additional hosting providers over the next few months.

  • The Bumper Score is free to all podcasters.

  • No, the podcaster owns their Bumper Score. The score will only be visible to the owner of the show who can then share it with their advertisers.

  • The Bumper Score is available to all podcasters starting May 22 2026. Join the waitlist now!

  • Yes. For podcasts that are available on YouTube, this data will be included in the calculation of their Bumper Score. However, there’s no requirement to publish episodes on YouTube in order to get a Bumper Score.

  • The Bumper Score answers one question: how well does a show deliver ads to a verified audience? It's calculated automatically from three data inputs:

    • Podcast delivery data from hosting providers

    • Verified Listeners from consumption platforms

    • Episode-level listener retention

  • We built the Bumper Score with advertisers in mind. Bumper developed it so publishers can qualify their ability to reach verified audiences.

    But have already heard ideas about other applications of the Bumper Score:

    • Acquisition strategy for networks

    • Promo swap evaluations

    • Better understanding the ‘quality’ of one’s audience