Podcast Subscriber Tracking Is Pointless

Most podcasters want one thing for people to listen to their content, so it makes sense that understanding of podcasts, total subscriber count would be a good thing. Only it isn't.

Hello, and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me. Evo Terra. I know it sounds totally crazy, but really you don't have to care about how many people are subscribed to your podcast. You really, really don't. This came up last week because a new service, which I'm not even going to mention because it doesn't matter, but a new web service, a new ish web service, came online.

Letting podcasters, letting anybody. Enter in a name of a podcast and it would go and return for you. The count of subscribers that podcast had on a handful of apps and it was like, goodness, what interesting information this have. Said some podcasters said many other podcasters. Um, these numbers don't seem to line up with what my podcast hosting company, the per service that's responsible for serving the media files.

It shows a totally different picture. What's going on here. What's going on here was a bunch of FID being sewn, FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which for no apparent reason, I don't know, I guess it wasn't fun regardless. Anyhow, this service did exactly what it said. It would take the name of a podcast, it would go find the name of that podcast or a close match, which was one of the problems, and check the various apps.

That would. That typically not typically, that always report subscriber count and it would bring that back. And it was this fascinating thing. Everybody was all excited about it, but again, it was, it was kind of pointless. And the reason it was pointless was this. For example, it showed for this particular program I do called podcast pontifications, that the biggest number of subscribers I had came from sound cloud.

Now you are a working podcast. Are you likely are familiar with a, the sound cloud, which is a online music sharing service more than anything else that barely supports podcasting. Sorry, SoundCloud. Not like you haven't tried to do this for a long time, but you haven't. And yes, I do publish my episodes on SoundCloud because there are some people who use SoundCloud and my philosophy of podcast distribution is put your show and your episodes everywhere and anywhere someone might want to listen.

SoundCloud is one of those for me. SoundCloud, by far was my biggest, biggest number, but it's completely and totally untrue because while I might have a whole lot of people who are subscribed to my show on SoundCloud. I don't have very many people that listen to my show on SoundCloud. In fact, one of my clients, she showed a crazy number of subscribers, like 5,000 subscribers on SoundCloud.

So I went and checked. She does not have 5,000 subscribers on SoundCloud. That's another podcast, which has a very similar name that this system got wrong, but even if she did have 5,000 subscribers on SoundCloud, she wouldn't have 5,000 listeners. You see a subscriber count. Doesn't take into consideration the way that podcast listening works now.

Now, maybe you like me. We do subscribe to a lot of shows. I have something like 178 subscriptions in my podcast listener. I use Apple podcasts. Do I listen to 174 shows, episodes of those shows every single week or sometimes daily, though definitely not. Many of those shows are subscribed at their old subscriptions.

Many of those subscribed, those subscriptions aren't being updated regularly, but that's all fine and good for me. But for the new wave of of listeners, as I've talked about previously on the show, there's not a lot of subscription that's happening. People are more sampling shows. They're are listening to one or two episodes.

They're going back and checking. I know it sounds weird and wild, but that's the reality of things. But to me, the biggest problem with subscriptions is that they don't represent anything. Ask any email marketer out there. Go do a search of what's the average open rate for an email marketer, and what you'll see is that while it's great to have 100,000 subscribers to your email, or even a hundred people who have given their email address to your system and said, yes, please automatically send me email every week when someone gets my episode, or every time I put out a new, an article or whatever.

You will find that your open rates hover around the 40% Mark 40% that means 60% don't even open the emails you get. Now, if you think that's crazy and you don't believe that, would you take a look at your inbox, that overflowing thing that you've probably have and see how many automatic emails you get that you do not open.

Why would you think it's any different for podcasting? It's easy to click the button that says subscribe. Sure, but what about actually listening? Okay. Take a look at the gigantic YouTube channels. Tens of thousands of subscribers, millions of subscribers. They don't have tens of thousands or millions of views on their video.

Quite often for YouTube, it's an even lower number. I mean, this oftentimes single digit percentages. Sometimes there's no relationship between total subscriber account and actual views. The video, it's no different in podcasting. These apps like SoundCloud, but also many others, they make it easier for you to subscribe, but they are, and the only thing that really does is causes a little alert window.

Maybe if someone still has that enabled to show a little red icon when a new episode is released. But how many of those things have you ignored on your phone? See, subscriptions, buying over themselves aren't all that important. It's the activity of listening that you really want to do. So it's great that you have all these subscribers.

That's wonderful, and yes, you should continue to ask people to subscribe to your show. I'm not suggesting you stop doing that. But just understand that that big subscriber count, it really means nothing. And even a small subscriber counts doesn't mean very much. It's not as important as you would think it is.

So if you're going out of your way to really try and track subscribers, like you've done something silly, like continue to use FeedBurner. Or some other service because it gives you what you think is an accurate subscriber account. You're just wasting your time and probably putting people through a whole lot of hoops they don't need to go through.

Yes. List your show everywhere. Yes. Encourage people to subscribe, but stop trying to attract subscribers for your podcast. It just doesn't matter. What does matter. Is that you go to rate this podcast.com/pod pond and, uh, you know, rate this podcast simple enough to do. Also, if you found the information I provided today or any of my 260 other episodes, informative and helpful, go to buy me a coffee.com/evo Terra and, you know, buy me a coffee.

You can set it up so that it buys me a coffee automatically every single month. Coffee is more important than subscribers. And if you need help with your business, podcast setting strategy for your show, all of those sorts of things, which just get tricky. Why that's what we do here at simpler media productions.

‍