Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless To Everyone

16 years in and podcasting still relies on an obfuscated and disconnected-from-reality metric to track all aspects of success: file downloads. There’s a better way. Several, in fact.

September 30, 2020

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This article is not going to win me any friends, but I hope that even my detractors will take the few minutes necessary to read this before expressing their dismay. Because we really need to stop talking about downloads in podcasting. Completely. Because downloads are a worthless podcasting metric for all parties. And we deserve better.

Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless to Advertisers

Yes, I’m aware that most podcast advertising inventory today is priced and purchased based on the number of downloads an episode is projected to receive. And it is with that full awareness that I assure you no advertiser wants to buy podcast advertising inventory that way. And they certainly don’t want to pay out that way.

Instead, advertisers want to pay when their ads are listened to by the right audience in the right geography at the right time.

Downloads, by themselves, illuminate none of that. Downloads are nothing more than an internal count of computers talking to computers. They provide no actionable insight into human listening behavior.

Of course, the counter-argument here is based on the fact that all that actionable insight happens at the podcast listening app-level, and apps aren’t reporting that data back to advertisers or publishers.

Spotify is changing that narrative, working with select advertisers to optimize campaign performance around true listening activity. And they’re not alone. I encourage you to read the great dialog between Amplifi Media and Sounds Profitable, where Steven Goldstein and Bryan Barletta walk through the sweeping changes we’re already seeing in podcast advertising.

Then there’s the fact that downloads of podcast media files can be faked in a way that podcast media hosting companies following IAB 2.0 guidelines (which leave too much to interpretation anyway) cannot detect. Anthony Gourraud details exactly how he faked downloads that were tracked and measured by IAB compliant hosts and tracking services. He did it without malice to point out a vulnerability. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a deliberate and distributed effort done at scale could artificially inflate download counts significantly.

You might argue that advertising on Spotify might change, but not the myriad other publishers and podcasts that monetize with advertising. In the short term, I’d agree with you. But as advertisers gain a better picture of the disparity between actual listener behavior provided by Spotify and file download activity provided by their media host, the inferiority of downloads will become more obvious, eroding the trust placed in that metric.

We’ve seen how that plays out before. Enough data will be correlated to provide a statistically relevant “discount factor” used to ratchet down the value of low-trust download numbers. High-trust data (measuring listens) will be sold at a premium. Low-trust data (measuring downloads) will be sold on the cheap, forcing publishers to apply pressure directly on other apps to provide similar data to reclaim the value of their mutli-platform ad inventory. And if (when?) apps refuse to do so, publishers will become more receptive to exclusive arrangements and co-branding engagements with those apps who protect that value.

Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless For Track Show Popularity

Tom Webster of Edison Research published an article that illustrates what I'm calling “The Serial Problem”. That popular podcast from 2014 hasn’t had a new episode of the show since late 2018, yet it constantly shows at the top of “podcast trackers” that rely on download tracking. Yes, Serial is certainly a popular show and I’m sure new people discover or decide to listen every day. But people new to Serial aren’t driving it up the charts. It’s the automatic download of not-Serial content by podcast apps still subscribed to the Serial RSS feed doing that.

Popularity rankers aren’t smart enough (though they could be) to separate automatic downloads from promotional content by legacy subscribers from actual consumer behavior of the actual podcast episodes. The problem isn’t on the shoulder of the publishers making smart use of the network effect. It’s on the reliance of downloads to populate these charts, even though downloads often have nothing to do with the human activity they are attempting to track.

The obvious improvement here is to track the actual popularity among consumers against the totality of episodes of the show itself. Counting how the unique requests to the RSS feed would be one data point, especially if it were combined with unique accesses of all the files that make up a particular podcast, but aggregated to individuals/households. And yes, we can do all of this today, getting rid of these out-of-date rankings that are deeply, deeply flawed.

Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless For Measuring Show Growth

Want to double the number of downloads your podcast gets in a month? Produce twice as many episodes. Well that was easy, wasn’t it? You may not have gained a single listener, but you’ll see ~100% growth.

Not helpful, is it?

Similarly, apps and the occasional individual often “go rogue”, downloading every single media file to be found in a show’s RSS feed. If you see spikes in your historical daily downloads, it’s probably due to something like this. And it’s almost impossible to filter out of the data, leaving you with a view askew of your show’s growth.

A much better way to measure show growth is by measuring the unique audience of a podcast over a period of time, noting how often each unique person accesses one or more episodes of a podcast. Google Analytics tracks this for websites. They call it Active Users, and it shows the number of people who actively engaged with your website at 7-, 14-, and 28-day intervals.

With the data available today, podcast hosting companies can - and should - provide this data to all podcasters. How many episodes were downloaded by those active users is immaterial to understanding show growth. Though it might be interesting to know when looking at engagement.

Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless For Tracking Engagement

Social media is all about engagement metrics, but that’s never really been a thing for podcasting. Probably because engagement is a very human activity, and downloads, as previously defined, are a computer-to-computer metric masquerading as a poor proxy for human activity.

But once you have a good handle on active users over various time frames, you’re able to examine and segment on activity, isolating Binge Listeners (unique users who consumed 10 or more episodes in a 7 day period, for example) from Samplers (only one episode consumed in a month, perhaps). We might find interesting, data-driven learnings on Time To Listen by calculating the amount of time that elapsed from the file request (taking into consideration automatic download vs user-initiated requests) to actual listening. That would be a fascinating study, you know?

Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless For Podcast Hosting Pricing

Podcast hosting companies have real costs they need to recoup from their paying clients. But “downloads” aren’t what causes costs to go up. At least not on their own.

Broadly speaking and ignoring the costs inherent with payroll, marketing, and other overhead necessary to run a business, the variable costs podcast hosting companies face are for bandwidth and file storage. That’s it. Yes, more downloads of media files increase their bandwidth cost, but not uniformly. My episodes are about 9 MB each. A 2-hour long episode of another show might be 120 MB. It’s the file size combined with downloads that are the factor.

I get that basing podcast media file hosting pricing tiers on the number of downloads is a convenient shorthand. Candidly, I’m not sure what better solution won’t confuse the heck out of podcasters. What I do know is that basing pricing on downloads is flawed from the start. And it continues to propagate the myth that downloads are an important metric in podcasting.

For all the reasons I’ve laid out and more, I assure you that tracking podcast downloads is worthless to everyone.

I remind you that ByMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra is where you can go show to your support, even if I made you mad with this particular episode. I'm sorry that my thoughts will impact your livelihood, but here we are.

And please tell a friend about Podcast Pontifications. It can be this episode if you agree with my assessment. If you think I missed the mark, then simply share the overall show with a friend who is also a podcaster, Word of mouth from one podcaster to another is the only way that this show grows.

I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Transcript

PPS3E41 Tracking Podcast Downloads Is Worthless To Everyone - Transcript

[00:00:00] 16 years in podcasting still relies on an obfuscated and disconnected from reality metric to track all aspects of success. File downloads. There's a better way. Several in fact.

Hello and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me, Evo, Tara. This is not going to win me any friends, but [00:00:30] I do hope you will hear me out for my conversation because we really need to stop talking about downloads in podcasting. They are worthless more to the point we deserve better. Now I say this because that's how we track everything.

And I'm going to run through a whole series of things that we track with downloads. And it's just [00:01:00] almost an arbitrary number. It's, it's an output. It's not an outcome. They're just, they've never been good. And we don't have to rely on those anymore. I'm just going to jump right in. Many people say, no, no, no Evo you're wrong because the reason we have downloads and it's on every single podcast app, well, every single podcast, host reports, downloads, downloads, downloads irritating.

And the reason we do that people will say is because of advertising. Well, I'm here to tell you that [00:01:30] downloads are actually quite worthless for basing out ad performance and add payouts. They are, they're what we use today sometimes, but they are worthless because advertisers aren't buying download or not download doesn't mean anything.

It means a file was downloaded. Not by a person. It just means a download actually happened. That is a, that's a buying, no reason to buy that. [00:02:00] Advertisers only want to pay when the ads are listened to by the right audience. By the right person or the right household in the right geography. They only want to pay when the campaign fulfills its needs.

When you or someone they are targeting is actually listening. That's really what they want to do. And you were saying, well, they can't do that because apps don't report that data. Oh. But they do offer in Spotify [00:02:30] have come along. And are now reporting that data back to select advertisers and that's only going to grow.

Look, don't take my word for it. There was a great article published not long ago. A combination of amplify media and sounds profitable where Steven Goldstein and Brian Barletta went through all of this and discussed the coming changes to. Podcast advertising. Thanks to what Spotify is actually doing.

And also advertisers are [00:03:00] demanding that that's one challenge with tracking for advertising. The second one is, did you see the recent article by a gentleman named Anthony grout, which I know I'm not pronouncing properly. He showed how easy it is to fail downloads that cannot be caught or trapped. By the IAB 2.0 guidelines.

Why are the guidelines that can't be tracked? This system deployed would artificially boost, [00:03:30] podcast downloads, episode downloads, and no one could stop it and it can be done at scale, relatively cheaply. So that's why advertisers don't want to pay for it. When they know the systems can be easily gained and they can't be stopped.

And that's just going to continue. Now you might argue that, well, hold on. That may be fine for Spotify, but what about all the other places where podcasters are monetizing them and they're tracking on downloads again, [00:04:00] downloads, aren't really all that helpful. And then we're going to less become less helpful as more people start using Spotify data to find out what's the difference between a download and an actual ad.

Listen. And once we get that number figured out, we'll have enough data, enough statistical relevance. We can predict not predict we can forecast what that actually means. So we can say, well, these many podcast downloads happen on these apps, which don't provide us that level of data fine using the information that we do [00:04:30] have.

We can now figure out what that means, what that means for the chance of okay. If they got X number of downloads. Well, we have to put a factor of, maybe we dropped that number down by 3% or 30% or. 98%. They drop it down drastically until those apps start to go. Well, heck now we're under pressure. People are pushing people away from our phones.

Do you see the spiral look advertising is changing the game. It's not all about advertising. I don't want to make this all about advertising and more things to talk about. As you can see, I'm a little worked up about [00:05:00] this tracking. Downloads is also worthless as a way to track popularity and top lists of podcasts.

There was recently an article by Tom Webster. And by the way, every length that I'm talking about will be in the episode details. So just feel free to click through. There's an article Tom Webster wrote not long ago for pod news that basically showed that it's, it's what I'm calling it. The serial problem, right?

Cereals continues to show up in the list of the top podcasts. Not [00:05:30] because people are listening to serial and they certainly do. I'm not saying people don't discover cereal every single day and then listen to it. It was a great show. But it's artificially driven because cereal is smart and put additional episodes in their feed for other products, gas that is stupidly, these Podtrac rating systems and others track back to the show and said, well, it got downloads.

This show got downloads there for us really popular. There weren't even episodes of the show. A much better way to do that, track the [00:06:00] audience itself, but maybe feed pains, maybe looking at unique touches of all the files that make up a particular show. There's a better way to do that. We would get rid of some of those false flags out there.

I think it's worthless for tracking your shows growth. We already know that if you double the output of episodes you make and you keep your audience the same, you'll double your downloads. So that's dumb. And then there's the fact that apps and sometimes individuals go [00:06:30] rogue downloading everything. And that screws up your numbers because they download 900 of your episodes.

That's a dine hundred downloads. That doesn't mean you had 900 listens. You may never have 900 listens, a much better way to do that is to track your unique. Audience, maybe over seven days, how often do they come back? After seven days after 14 days after 30 days, how many unique people showed up during those timeframes?

It's kind of like monthly active users, but I guess it's weekly and fortnightly active users and [00:07:00] monthly active users for podcasting, but it's not total downloads. It's actually tracking the total number of people who are, are reached by that. Now, speaking of reach, speaking of reach, it's also downloads are also worthless for tracking audience engagement.

So I mentioned previously download that 350 episode 900. So what, so what we'll take those, em, those active user lists, seven, 14 and 30 days and track engagement basically at, by how many [00:07:30] times, how many people listened to multiple episodes or multiple times we know it by individual. We should be able to track all of that back.

Let's segregate out the binge listeners. And let's, and maybe we look at things like time to consumption from the time a file was downloaded or access. When did it actually get listened to too, and how much and all those factors so much more important. I started this by saying podcast hosts, all show this they do, but it's also kind of worthless for them.

Even the ones that track [00:08:00] the podcast downloads as a way to figure out what their pricing tiers are. Look, I get that it's a convenient shorthand, but hosting costs aren't predicated. On the number of downloads you get, that is all a factor of how much bandwidth you're using and how much vial sizes are those assess the size of the files.

Those are the only two factors bandwidth, which has to do with file size and storage of those files. That's it. So why not change or charge by maybe something where you factor in what's the size of [00:08:30] your audience? What are the weight? How heavy are your vials? How big are they? What's your frequency? I know that's not easy podcast hosting companies, but come on, we've got to do a better way than tracking downloads.

Right. I've been ranting for a long time. I thank you for listening to my Ted talk. If you will about downloads what we got to move past this kind of stuff. Anyhow, two things, and I'll let you go buy me a coffee.com/evo. Terra is where you can go show your support for this show. Even if I made you mad [00:09:00] with this particular episode, I'm sorry that I'm impacting your livelihood, but here we are.

Buy me a coffee.com/eba, Tara. And please tell a friend. About podcast. Pontifications maybe this episode, if you agree with me, certainly not this episode, if you don't agree with me, or just simply the show, send a friend who is also a podcaster, a note telling them about podcast, pontifications word of mouth from one podcast or to another is the only way that this show grows.

So pretty pleased with sugar on it. Make that happen. [00:09:30] That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast. Pontifications cheers.

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