Content Strategy

Distribution Strategy

Facing Podcasting's Round Peg Square Hole Problem

Podcasters tend to take a monolithic view of podcast listening apps, as evident by “wherever you get your podcasts.” But human behavior is more complicated than that, and it’s up to us to adapt.

May 24, 2021

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Most podcasters, at least those of us who wish our shows to grow, want three things. And in this order, if you please:

We want people to subscribe to our show so that
they can download our episodes so that they can
listen to what we have to say.

Broadly speaking, we’re not picky and we really don't care what listening app someone uses to subscribe to our show. We know there are myriad apps used by podcast listeners. So long as we get them to hit that subscribe button (or, fine, follow button) we’re good with whatever they choose.

Where And How People Listen May Surprise You

You, the podcaster, may have a favorite podcast listening app. Regular humans, as it turns out, are a bit less devoted and use several different podcast listening apps to consume podcasts. Don’t believe me? Edison Research has been tracking the behavior of podcast consumers for a couple of years now, and a recent spotlight by Tom Webster demonstrates this difference in perception of reality, summed up nicely in this single data table:

Platform/Service Ever Used (Edison Research Podcast Consumer Tracker Q1 2021) data, showing YouTube at 43%, Spotify at 41%, and Apple Podcasts at 31%.

Yes, those numbers add up to 115%. No, that’s not bad math. That’s reflective of the fact that people use different apps to listen to podcasts.

Astute podcasters, or perhaps just those who obsess over the analytics sections of their podcast hosting companies, will have some questions. Like why are those numbers so similar to one another. And what the hell is YouTube doing in there? And why is it on top?

Again, I assure you this is not a math problem. Though come to think of it, there is a math problem. It’s just not the one you’re thinking it is.

Download Is A Useless Metric To Most Podcasters, Take 17

When we dig into the three platforms/services most frequently used by podcast listeners, as reported by podcast listeners, we find three vastly different methods of counting.

Apple Podcasts, the only dedicated podcast listening app in our data set, automatically downloads episodes for followers, both at the time the follow is initiated and each time a new episode is published. The app requests the file from the media hosting company each and every time this happens, and the hosting company dutifully logs and reports that activity. For every Apple Podcasts follower. Regardless of whether or not the human who owns the device ever bothers to listen to the episodes. For reference, I use Apple Podcasts to listen to most of my fiction podcasts.

But Apple Podcasts isn’t alone in this helpful (?) behavior. Overcast, an iOS-only app preferred by many heavy podcast listeners for its advanced features and customizability will also continue to happily download episodes of a podcast you stopped listened to months ago. For reference, I’m also an Overcast user, currently for my “daily” listens and a shared playlist for when my wife and I are driving together.

Spotify doesn’t “download” episodes on its own. Instead, when a Spotify listener plays an episode, it streams the file (actually called a progressive download to satisfy the pedants) from Spotify’s own servers, not the media host of the podcast. Yes, there’s a “data passback” procedure in place between Spotify and most podcast hosting providers to get Spotify’s intent-based activity into the hosting provider’s analytics package, incorrectly listed as a “download” when it clearly is not. For reference, I use Spotify mostly to sample new podcasts.

YouTube will never show up on your podcast’s media-host-provided analytics page at all, because YouTube doesn’t serve audio files. Of the 43% of podcast listeners who say they use YouTube to listen to podcasts, 100% of them are actually watching a video file that was loaded to YouTube’s servers. For reference, I rarely listen to/watch podcast episodes on YouTube. But I have.

So I repeat: Math is a problem, but math is not the big problem here. The big problem is that podcasters see all three of those platforms as distinctly different, yet we try our damnedest to treat them all the same.

Why Don’t Podcasters Make Platform-Appropriate Content?

YouTube always shows up as a popular podcast listening app, and podcasters always poo-poo the data for many true reasons that mean nothing to the millions of people who do, in fact, consume podcasts on YouTube.

While I certainly do not profess to have cracked YouTube’s secrets, it’s no secret at all what works well on YouTube. Just watch your social feeds for an hour and you’ll see that it’s shorter-form clips and highlights that tend to get shared. Yes, long-form content also can live on YouTube. So yes, you can put your full-length episodes up on YouTube and treat YouTube like every other distribution channel. But that’s not all you can do on YouTube, podcaster.

Spotify is a music-focused app. Though they’re making tons of changes to be more than just music, they’re heavily influenced by music. Yes, we can (and do) submit our shows to Spotify so our episodes are distributed there. But what else can we do? Maybe podcasters should experiment with what’s worked in music before. Alternate cuts of episodes? Radio edits, for either brevity or bleeped out swear words? How about live versions of episodes record “on location” somewhere? Why not re-releases of collections of episodes, or even re-mastered tracks?

Every year we hear from consumers that they listen to our shows in ways we have trouble wrapping our heads around. And every year, we close our eyes to the reality staring us in the face and resume our efforts of trying to distribute our episodes everywhere with as little effort as possible.

The data don’t lie. Meeting our audience where they listen (or watch) with the kinds of content they want to listen to (or watch) seems the most rational course of action.

What would you change about your podcast publishing if you considered your Apple Podcasts audience different from your Spotify audience, which is distinctly different from your YouTube audience?

Because they are all three distinctly different audiences. Perhaps it’s time to treat them as such.

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Season Break Coming Up!

Season 3 of Podcast Pontifications wraps this coming Thursday. Season 4 will start up again in mid-July 2021. Later this week, I’ll send out a special communique just to those of you who get PPIYI—that’s Podcast Pontifications In Your Inbox—missives. If you’re reading this in your inbox, that’s you!

But if you’re reading this on the website, you’ll want to subscribe to PPIYI to get not just that note, but also some special content while I’m taking a break from the mic and video camera.

It’s totally free. Just head to PodcastPontifications.com and click the big “SUBSCRIBE” button on the top of the page. Then enter in your email, sit back, and relax. It’s easy!

And if my musings from this episode struck a chord, please consider going to BuyMeACoffee.com/evoterra and doing just that.

I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He’s on a mission to make podcasting better. Allie Press proofed the copy, corrected the transcript, and edited the video. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media.

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Podcasters tend to take a monolithic view of podcast listening apps, as evident by "wherever you get your podcasts." But human behavior is more complicated than that and it's up to us to adapt.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Most podcasters, at least those of us who wish our shows to grow, we want three things and we want them in this order. First, we want someone to subscribe to our show. So that number two, they can download our episodes. And then number three, listen to what we have to say.

We really don't care where that first part happens, the subscribing part begins because we know there are myriad apps out there people can and do choose to subscribe to podcasts on. We don't really care so long as it happens.

Now, if we look at some fascinating reports, which I will have a link to Tom Webster's wonderful breakdown of what it means in the episode details. If we take a look, we will see that when we ask the public who listen to podcasts, what do you listen to podcasts on? They give us the following answers: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And those numbers are fairly even between those. There's little pluses and minuses there, but by and large, those are the three apps people who listen to podcasts say they use to listen to podcasts.

But it's already off the rails for any of you who have ever looked in your podcast listening stats. Because we know that ain't true. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. When we look into our stats, we will almost always see Apple Podcasts right there on top. So that part we agree with. But Spotify? At like, an equal level? That's insane! And YouTube? Come on! These don't work at all.

Well, I posit to you that perhaps they do. First, we have a math problem. It's a math problem because the signals we are using to count on the backend us podcasters who can see what's actually coming in and hitting our stuff, the way that those numbers are counted, are counted differently. There's a different process. Let me tell you what I mean very briefly. Apple Podcasts auto-downloads - by the way, so it does Overcast - your episodes of your show, so a download is just simply that, it's a download. It's not a listen.

Spotify, it doesn't download at all, really, it instead streams. Okay, fine, pedants, progressively downloads, whatever. And they may or may not pass back the data properly to your podcast hosting app if it's not been set up properly because they do cache the information and stream from there.

And YouTube will never show up on your podcast stats because it's not hitting an audio file. You have to create a video file and upload it, and then you're stuck with YouTube's stats.

So yeah, math is a problem, but I don't think math is the big problem here. The big problem here, I see it, is that we are treating all three of those listening apps exactly the same instead of modifying the content we push out to those apps to make it specific for that platform.

Let's take YouTube. YouTube is a perennial topic. It comes up all the time. We see it in the numbers and none of us believe it. But let's suspend our disbelief for a moment and do a breakdown of YouTube. What works on YouTube? Well, we know what works on YouTube are the things we see in our social media feeds all the time and that is clips and highlights. That's what gets shared - clips and highlights. Not an entire movie, television show, 45-minute-long rant.

But most of us podcasters, including myself here, when we use YouTube, we just dump out our entire episode. Try to make YouTube just one more distribution channel for us like we have everywhere else. But it's not. It's uniquely not and we know it's not. It's not a surprise to us it's not. It's not.

Apple Podcasts, I just talked about how it auto-downloads and there's a huge disconnect for any of you who have ever looked at Apple Podcast's backend, Apple Podcasts Connect, if you can log in. If you've ever looked, you've noticed a big disconnect between the number of listeners it shows and the number of downloads.

Now, some have argued, as I have argued, that that may or may not be real. It's possible it's a data problem. Or it's also maybe an echo of a once dominant platform now in decline. But away from Apple Podcasts, which is the only podcast-specific app that we have, and let's think of Spotify for a second.

Now, Spotify, what is it mostly? It's a music-focused app that now has podcasts in it. But it's still music heavy. The people who will use Spotify are heavy music users. So maybe we podcasters should experiment with things that work in music like alternate cuts, radio edits, live versions, re-releases, remasters - the things that are endemic to the music industry. We could do that on that platform.

Because if these platforms really are where our potential audience are and every year they tell us the same thing, people, they tell us that's where they really are, doesn't it make sense that we should try and meet them where they are? How would you change your publishing approach if instead of thinking about your audience, your overall audience, you thought of your Apple Podcasts audience different from your Spotify audience, which is distinctly different, once again, from your YouTube audience?

I'll leave you with that pondering moment and say that this is the last week before I go on break. Season three will be over on Thursday. And then later on this week - by the way, just so you know, season four is coming back. But later on this week is a special newsletter-only announcement will be going out to all PPIYI, that's Podcast Pontifications In Your Inbox, subscribers, which is free to subscribe.

Go to Podcast Pontifications, hit the big subscribe button, enter your email, and you will be on the PPIYI list. And you'll find out what's happening with season four, which I've been teasing and I'm going to continue to tease because I want you to subscribe to that newsletter. Yeah, you should.

And if you loved this idea, this thought made you wonder how you're going to shift your approach, should you shift your approach? Thinking about these individual publishing destinations as just that - different places to publish different content, not just a place to drop the same thing. If that sparks an interest in you, whether you love it or hate it, please consider going to buymeacoffee.com/EvoTerra, and doing just that, buying me a coffee.

That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

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