 Gaster's round table, round 101. All right, rolling on that second chunk of episodes. So we hit 100, let's go for the next 100. So we're at PR 200, 200 rounds. Ding, ding, ding, who's gonna make it? Battle Royale. And I think I've actually, I think it's the second time I've used Battle Royale in talking about the round table. And I don't even watch wrestling. But back in the 80s, I'm old enough to remember Battle Royales. Okay, stats. That's what it said. The title of this thing was just called stats. So that's what we're gonna talk about. It's more, we've talked about stats before on a round table. And I think it was more around like accurate measurement of stats. And we'll talk a little bit about that. This time it's a little bit more personal. It is more like, how do you use stats? As a podcaster in your workflow. And that's the focus, but you know, we can start there and go anywhere. And the people that are gonna help us do that are the round tableers, starting off with co-hosts. Extraordinaire, Daniel J. Lewis, welcome back. Thank you. I have more than one downloader from my podcast. And I'm grateful for that stat. Well, it's you, but that's cool. I think it's nice to love yourself a little bit. Whoa, Dave Jackson, he's like just popped up and like wedged himself apart and the screen open. And I heard the Simpsons play. That's, that was great. Dave Jackson, welcome. Well, yeah, glad to be here. Who knew a really old Camry would do a 95 miles an hour and not even vibrate. So life is good. Dave risking, risking tickets at life in limb, apparently of everybody for the round table. So we appreciate that here. Glad you're back. All right, first time round tableer, Stephen, welcome. Hey, thank you for having me. Glad to be here. This is your first time, right? It is my first time. You're getting my cherry, man. Oh man, all right. Well, we get a lot of those here. So that's how I designed this show, selfishly. Now, if you're watching the video version and you should be on youtube.com slash podcasters round table, there is a ton of medals behind Stephen. Stephen, what do you do to get all those medals? I have to know. I am a long distance runner. I like to run anything longer than the marathon. So anything over 26.2 miles is for me. So is that somewhere between ultra and marathon? Anything over 26.2 is ultra is ultra. What's the longest you've run? 55 miles. I did two weekends ago. Oh, we have a hundred mile right here coming up in a couple months. 100. That's awesome. It would take me two weekends. No, probably more to run 55 miles. That's awesome. So what is your podcast, Stephen? My podcast is the Heartland running podcast. It's myself, my two great co-hosts. And we just kind of geek out about anything running. Right on. All right. And returning roundtabler. Sean, welcome back. Thanks, Ray. It's always an honor to be on the roundtable. And I am Sean Thorpe with Blueberry Support amongst a number of other podcasty related things. And the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of stats is I really just don't ever care to look at mine. So. Sean, do you have an act? What's your show? I do kind of somewhat regular podcasts, sort of regular with my wife called Hyper Nonsense. And we've been doing it actually off and on since 2006. And it's kind of an old school podcasting 1.0 show. And we do it for fun. It's a hobby. Podcasting 1.0, what does that mean? You start it because of the year you started? Or what is the 1.0? No, I just mean that it doesn't have, I don't know, if someone decides they want to start learning to podcast in 2017. There's a lot of talk of avatars and plans and all this kind of stuff. And back in 05 and 06, you kind of, a lot of people anyway, us, we just started because we thought it would be fun. And we never really changed our outlook on it. So it has an audience, but it is a small, but dedicated audience. And we do love them. But I don't spend a lot of time pouring over stats on that show. Awesome. Well, the first question I had up here in my notes, I did make notes today, was when was the last time you looked at your stats? So for Jean, you can answer that. But it doesn't sound like it's recently. Probably not. I think I just happened to glance at them maybe within the last couple of weeks. Because one of the things that happens a lot of time with the support work I do with Blueberry is sometimes I need to look at my own account to try to get an understanding of what's happening in someone else's account. So sometimes I just happen to log in there and I'll go, well, what are my stats looking like? And then I look at them and they're pretty much the same as the last time, however many months ago that was. So it would be dumb to ask who you use for your stats. Yeah. But I want to see it. But I will say, I used Blueberry stats for as long as Blueberry stats have existed. And that was many years before I joined the support team. It's time for me to just take a left turn, massive, take Dave's camera and just shove it off the road. Because as I'm reminded of something that I think that Sean deals with or has answered a lot in forums or wherever I see this all the time, any of the groups, Google+, Facebook. Squarespace and stats and Blueberry, right? So someone has a podcast on Squarespace, whether they're hosting there or they're just using their website and they want stats. Is that doable? How does that work? Yes, it is. And kind of the full story on that is apparently Squarespace's analytics, at least for podcasts, kind of suck. I've never seen them. So I don't really know how bad they are. But there is a workaround that actually a Squarespace user figured out for implementing. I mean, it could work for really any third party stats. So it definitely works for Blueberry, but it could work for PodTrack as well. And I'm not sure if there are any other third party stats suppliers right now. I feel like I just heard of a new one. But regardless, the methodology is there, but it is a pretty serious workaround that is not for someone who does not consider themselves at least a little tech savvy, but it can be done. Right, right. I think we'll get into that a little bit more about where to get stats. And these are, this is one of the things you might run into. It's not easy if that's where you're hosting. So sometimes you have to make decisions about, I guess, where you want your website or your host versus your stats, stuff like that. So that's cool. That applies to every podcaster when they're making these decisions or when they've made a decision later on, they decided to want to add something. But Steven, when was the last time you checked out your stats? I glanced at them today, but generally I check them once a week. Yeah, and so what are you looking for? Really, for me, I'm looking for any kind of pattern. And the stats, I mean, for, I'm sure it's this way in most podcasting. We got like a Cylon issue thing with your mic. It's breaking up. So I don't know if you can, whatever that problem was we had in the pre-show, it's back, back, back. Do you have a USB mic? No, I don't have a Whitney. Do whatever you did to fix it and hopefully it'll last. We'll get back to that question. Daniel, when was the last time you looked at your stats? This morning? Yeah, not because of this round, I'm hoping. Oh, okay. This morning. Okay. It's actually part of my daily routine to look at my stats. But no, I'm not one of those like that. What I do is I've bookmarked all of my stats from everything, whether it's affiliates or website browsers or different parts, YouTube stats, everything, is in a single folder inside of Chrome. And then what I do in the mornings or so, it's not the first thing I do, but sometime in the morning, I'll go to that folder in my bookmarks. I right click on it and I click open all in new window. And then it opens all 21 tabs in a new window. And it takes a minute to load or so, but loads much faster on my newer Mac that I got a couple of years ago than the Mac I had years before that. And I'm not looking at the exact numbers. I'm looking for trends. So I'm not really obsessing, even though I do check my stats every day and it's part of my daily routine. For me, I want to see, does anything stand out? How does it look like things are performing? And every now and then, like Google, for example, with the Google website stats, where you can see very easily, you can see your daily stats, number of visitors. And it's always very cyclical. It goes down on the weekends, goes up during the weekdays, down on the weekends, up on the weekdays. And that's what I look for. I want to see, though, is there a big spike one of those days or a big drop one of those days? Sometimes, and I think I actually did it just this morning or yesterday morning, I hovered my mouse over one of those days. So it showed me how many people visited my website in that day. And I was blown away because I had no idea the number was anywhere near that number. And that's because it has been growing over time. And I hadn't really been paying attention to the exact number. The same thing happens with other stats that I look at. I don't really remember the number. I just kind of know if today's number is close to yesterday's number. And that was one of the things I was interested in knowing, like, what, why are you looking, right? So you gave us that. But something curious came up there because the title is just it stats. Sometimes when I know we are podcast around table, sometimes I will define in the title podcast stats or podcast. You were kind of referring to website stats there. So when I bring up stats, I didn't put podcasts there. So now we have a podcast that's on a website. So it's related. But yeah, it's just something I wasn't thinking completely about. It could be podcast stats. It could be other stats that are related to podcasts. So that's your website too. So yeah, here's the list of the different types of stats. Not all the individual links, but the different types that I look at. Blueberry, Libsyn, iTunes site manager, Stitcher, Spreaker, Feed Burner, YouTube, Google Play Music and my active campaign email list subscribers and then the website stats from Google Analytics. So that, since you said the FB word, Richard Gunther, who I asked to be on, but he couldn't make it. So, but he had good questions. And one thing he asked was why Daniel says feed burner numbers are bad. Because he hears you say that all the time. And if he listens to the rest of us, he probably hears the same thing or has heard the same thing. So what do you say? Why are feed burner numbers bad? Feed burner gives a couple different numbers or actually a few different numbers. So join me children as we go into the depths of feed burners inaccuracies. When you look at your feed burner numbers, if you click into it and if you've enabled stats, it will look at how many times an item, an enclosure has been downloaded or an enclosure is, in other words, an episode has been downloaded from the feed. It looks at how many times an item has been visited through the feed. So like if someone taps to visit your episode webpage from looking at your RSS feeds, such as in Feedly or in the iOS 11 podcast app, you can now visit the episode webpage through there. And it also attracts how many subscribers there are to the feed. So the item downloads, the views, the clicks, those numbers are really worthless. They're just, they're so far from accurate. It's not even worth considering the number at all because it's not factoring in everything. Like if you look at your download stats there, it's not factoring in your website place because your website is not powered by the RSS feed. It's powered by your website. So it's not factoring that in. It's also not doing proper filtering and cross-IP checking and all this stuff that Blueberry, Lipson and these other hosting companies do and filter out. So the download number is completely inaccurate. The click-throughs and views are almost worthless really to know there's not much you can really do with those numbers or no. The main thing though is the subscriber numbers. And that's the number I check when I load my feed burner stats. I'm using feed burner in its raw state. Every single feature inside a feed burner is turned off. And that's the only way I would recommend using feed burner is if you turn off all the features, especially Smartcast. So that one number, the subscriber number, the reason that's not accurate is for one thing, it's only the number of subscriptions in one day. So if I look at my feed burner subscriber stats, I'm gonna see that dip on the weekends. And it looks like, oh no, I lost 400 subscribers over the weekend. Oh boy, I got them back on Monday, but oh no, I lost them again on Saturday. What am I doing? My podcast is horrible. So it's misleading because you're not actually, it's not a measurement of how many subscribers you have. It's a measurement of how many things checked your RSS feed on that day. Right, right. And I guess in theory you could probably keep like some extensive spreadsheet and go over a month and average it out. But I mean, I think that's the most important thing there is to understand that what is it counting and why is it dipping and going up and down is because it's checking it that day, right? And so the other problem there is just because something checks in a day, no, let me back up. Just because something doesn't check in a day doesn't mean that person's not subscribed. It just means that thing didn't check the RSS feed. And it's very possible, I think probably very likely because Feedburner has been pretty much almost abandoned by Google, except they did update it a couple years ago. But it's very possible that if you have a mobile device, for example, that when you're at home, your mobile device is on one IP address. When you get in the car and leave your home Wi-Fi, your mobile device has another IP address. Then when you're at the public library, your phone probably connects to the Wi-Fi there. So it has a different IP address. Then you go to the coffee shop, different IP address. So all of these places, depending on how often your podcast app checks for new episodes, it's refreshing that RSS feed. And each time it's doing that, it might be doing it from a different RSS feed, depending on how much you move around. And nothing seems to indicate that Google has properly accounted for that since Feedburner's basically abandoned. So most likely one person could account for multiple subscriptions, air quotes around that, for your stats. So that's why I say even the number inside Feedburner is really worthless. And what I look at Feedburner for is again, the trend. I wanna see, is it going up and by what percentage is it going up relative to a week ago or a month ago? Do I see it? You can't really do that with Feedburner though. Without keeping track, like I said, you can't really tell, you can't see trends because it's Feedburner. You can see trends in proper stats. Well, you can see if you go into the Feedburner stats dashboard you can see the little graph that shows how many quote subscribers and quote you had each day. And you can look at the beginning of the line and look at the end of the line over a 30 day period or you can look at it over a seven day period or all time or you can't export it and then do your own charts and stuff. But like for me, for example, if I look at my all time, I see a constant growth pattern. But what I also see are there are some significant spikes like the biggest percentage wise spike looking at my feed was, well, there was a big one in 2011 or so when I was on Cliff Ravenscraft show talking about podcast movement or podcast, podcast camp since 90, boy it was so long ago I couldn't even say it. There was some other big spike in mid 2014 but besides that, it's just consistent organic growth. Right. Dave, when was the last time you looked at your stats? I check them the same time when I'm uploading the new episode before I upload it, I go over and I look at my stats and I have this in Libsyn. Libsyn only? Well, whatever I'm doing. Well, no, I mean, how many places do you have stats? Well, I have stats in everything. I have stats in, I try it like every platform I have Wooshka, Omni Studio, Podbean, Pinecast is another one I've been playing with. They're all, you know, some of them are worse than others but usually for me, I mean, the ones that are on things like Wooshka and Pinecast and Podbean, those are shows that I'm, what I will call test shows. You know, Bernie the cat is not a serious podcast. I hate to pop your bubble but that's something I just did to test that platform. But for the school of podcasting, I basically go in my Libsyn stats and I add up the last four episodes at that time. And that just gives me a little snapshot. And I compare it to the last time I did that and I go, is the number bigger or smaller? And I am a little bit of an Excel geek so I have a trend line based on those numbers and I can see that it's for the last, you know, however long I've been doing the spreadsheet, the trend line is going up. So I'm happy and I kind of like Daniel, I'm looking to see if all of a sudden the numbers just dropped for no reason or they go up for some, it's like, well, wait a minute let's go back and look and see, you know, and then I might be able to either A spot an episode that really, really resonated with the audience or one that I thought was gonna resonate maybe didn't as much. So that's, and that's about it. I don't obsess about them. I'm trying to give the other shows. Yeah, I mean, like the podcast rodeo show, I don't even look at the stats. I'm just having fun with that show. I think what we hear a lot of times is that people's stats flat line. So, you know, you guys are both saying your stats keep going up and up, you rock, that's awesome. But I think a lot of people find a plateau and it levels off. And then people start asking, how do I grow on my show, right? And then that's the biggest thing people, I can always get probably good downloads if I put, you know, 100 ways to grow your show on the title. But, you know, do you ever see your shows level off? Dave, do you see that happen? And I mean, you've been podcasting a long time. Well, if I look at the, if I look at it, it's like a roller coaster. It goes, I'll have like a month where things are just going up and then I'll have two or three weeks where it's down a little bit. Then it goes up a little more and it goes down a little. So it's kind of a two steps forward or three steps forward, one step back kind of scenario. So, but the trend line based on that is going up. And when I say going up, it's not a hockey stick. It's, you know, I guess I could calculate it, but it's, you know, it's nothing crazy. It's, you know, if this is flat, it's, I don't know, if nine and three are on a clock, this is more kind of eight and two. Anyone who has lips and stats has that trend line. Do you, is that every, sometimes that doesn't seem madder to me, but. Well, for me, I always want to look at a trend that's longer than the month and that's where it gets. Oh, I always end up with two trend lines and I scratch my head and go, all right, I'll look at that later and then I, and that's kind of why I have my own little trend line for that. But yeah, if I look at a month or three months, it's fine. When I go to a year, I end up with two trend lines and that's where I'm like, and then again, I just look at, and just looking at it, you can see where for me, I publish weekly. And so every, you know, seven days, I have this big giant spike and I can just tell, you know, if I look at one right now for the past year and I look at the beginning of the graph and then I look at the one, if I look at the left side of the graph where I started in the right side of the graph, the last week, is that one taller than that? And I go, yeah, absolutely. So again, I'm not looking for hockey stick growth. I just want to know, is it growing? And it is, so that's where I'm like, and then there are other stats. Like my last episode I just did, I didn't think it was going to resonate at all. It was one of those where you hit publish and you kind of go, I'm not sure if people are going to get this or not. And I had like three or four people email me like, oh man, that's exactly what I was thinking. So that to me sometimes is more of a stat than how many downloads I get. It's how many people that tweet me or email me or whatever and say, that was the engagement show. You want engagement outside of the trend line. You want engagement. Yeah. Awesome. For my once upon a time podcast, you were asking about stagnating. It's going down and consistently going down. The TV show, I would imagine it doesn't have to do with the popular TV show, right? Yes, definitely. Because the TV show popularity is going down. The TV show actually ended this last season and now we're getting a spin-off, otherwise known as the seventh season of the TV show. Fans of the show or non-fans will get that joke. But I've seen that our peak for the podcast was in season two. I think that was also the peak for the show, but any fans of the show know that season two was also a really rough season for the show. Ever since then, I think it's been a consistent downward trend of the stats for that. And it's, yeah, it's because we're attached to a show that's going down. I think maybe other TV show fan podcasts might be going up because like, I don't know, Game of Thrones maybe, the increasing in popularity, maybe. This is us. Would be a good example of that. That's a- Dave's favorite show. I turn on and cry like a baby. All right, we gotta make sure we don't start that this is us fan podcast right here at the roundtable. Stephen, where do we leave off? Where do we leave off when we lost? Uh-oh. The first big issues. Nah, not working, working. We hear you, but we only hear ourselves. I don't know, toss on your built-in mic. Anything will work actually at this point. Nothing. Try something else. Yeah, you can reconnect, but it seems to have a time limit on it. I don't know, back in the day, hold on, let's check these out. If you're on video. If you're on video right now, this is the reason you should get to video. I'm gonna make actually bad for audio people. You should check it out. We love you first, but look at this. And an awesome little headset from- This is a Plantronics DSP 400. It is the newest model, 2017. This thing goes way back to the early twit days. This is old, man. This is something we mail to guest still. It's still relevant to interviewees at work because it's better than what they have, right? And they can send it back in the mail real easily. It does the job. And so that thing used to be famous on the This Week in Tech for having the Cylon effect. So after about like 45 minutes, it would do what you're hearing in Steven's audio and it's having this weird digital Cylon effect. So anyways, that reminded me of that. So that's for the podcast 1.0 crew, Sean. Hey, can you guys hear me now? Yeah, we do hear you. Probably sounds like garbage, but it's just my webcam. This is a good example of just get the audio. Like it sounds better than what we had just because we had technical issues. So we're good. Right. Don't know what was going on there. Yeah. Never had that issue before. That's live. It happens every couple of rounds. Everyone needs to know Steven normally has the voice of God, but because he's using his built-in microphone on his computer right now, that's why he sounds horrible. His stats are sure to fall. Our stats are gonna fall, our stats are gonna fall. Anyways, where do we leave off? You were answering a question when we hit the wall there. Well, you were talking about when do I check my stats? And I was saying I check them usually once a week. I'm just, I think Daniel kind of touched on it. I'm looking for trends. I'm just looking for a slow, steady growth, not explosive growth. And then you guys were talking about like plateauing and I'll see that too. And then it's like, okay, it's time to get a big name guessed on because that'll drive in a lot of traffic. Most won't stay, but some do. So it's kind of like you go up a little bit, plateau out, then just go up a little bit and that's a... When you're looking at your trend and you see something stand out, what do you do with that information? Well, if I know why, I'll try to repeat that. Sometimes it goes up and you're like, I didn't really like that episode. I don't know why it rose so high, but generally I'll go back. I'll ask, we have a pretty tight-knit Facebook group. We can ask them what was it that you really liked about this episode and hopefully we can find out what worked. Yeah, that's a huge one. So what I like is you're taking action on your stats. You see them level off and you think, let me shake it up a little bit, right? Let's get a big guess. And it sounds like maybe that works for, like you said, it has the exact effect of getting more attention that you might not have had before and a couple of those people will stick around. And that's how we grow, like one listener at a time, literally. But I like this question of how the heck does anyone know Dave said spikes and you see it go up and down? And in Dave's case, we know when you release an episode, the podcatchers are gonna download it automatically for people who have their things set to download automatic and you're gonna see that number go up over the first day or two and then it's gonna dip back down. But how do you track down what the heck is happening? I will say right now, I had like three to five X growth on the podcaster studio. I know that's not real. And there is no way that show is getting 12 to 15,000 downloads. So something's going on, but guess what? I couldn't tell you what. I mean, Daniel and I, we probably think it's some players loading it somewhere that typically can be what happens, but it's nothing that I've created. So if this could happen, say someone links to your podcast and it puts it into a player, I mean, like all of a sudden my Lipsin stats, which are fantastic, Lipsin is known for having great stats, blueberry, pod track. I can't rely on them. Like how the heck am I gonna track that down? So that's what I'm going through right now. But when you guys see things and if you can diagnose my issue, that'd be fantastic. Well, with Lipsin stats, you can go in and you have your little spiky thing. We're gonna use technical terms like that, the little spiky thing. And you have a little ball at the top of that. If you click on that ball, it'll expand to show you out of, if I did today, here's what you downloaded on September 21st. And you can go in and see that, okay, there's my latest episode, it got X amount of downloads. And wow, here's my whole back catalog is getting downloaded. So that'll give you an idea. And then there are things, Kale Nelson does Ham Radio 360 and he had a really popular blog about whatever Ham Radio or somebody else did, some influencer in that realm and put a link directly to his website. And so he could go in and see that, and he was getting, I think he said like 600 downloads on a podcast that was like three months old. So all of a sudden he had, it had spiked and then it was down to, kind of doing nothing. And then all of a sudden there was this big thing and he was able to go in and see that that's where it was coming from. That's not always the case, but. Printing this to Bain's Naughty Bits in the chat room said, well, the upcoming hardcore Apple stats cause mass podcast suicides. We'll probably talk about the suicides in a moment, but I do want to mention the podcast stats coming to Apple, bring something that right now the other, I mean, besides the obvious consumption analytics to see how much of an episode is consumed. I know we'll talk about that probably soon, but something that the big three in podcast stats, Libsyn, Blueberry and Podrax, something that they don't have, that I think maybe some of the fringe newbies do have, although their algorithms aren't quite refined, is to be able to show you that actual per episode trending information. Like to see this episode after 30 days got this many downloads, then this episode after 30 days got this many downloads. Like Dave is doing that manually. In Apple podcasts, in actually I'll share my screen here because I've got the slide right up. Inside of Apple podcasts, the podcast connect. This is a slide from their presentation at WWDC. So the actual information might be a little bit different, but if you want the slide number, if you search for the WWDC presentation, this is slide, oh, I don't know what slide number this is anymore, but it's somewhere around, oh, there we go, 76, if you want to check it in the PDF slides. But what they show is they do show several episodes in a graph laid out across a number of days and all of the episodes having the same start point. So day zero, they got this many downloads. Day two, they all got this many downloads. Day three, they all get this many downloads. All the way up to it looks like day 60. So you can see how quickly are each of your episodes reaching that plateau point. And in their example here, you can see at day 22 is when all of the episodes reached that plateau point. Some episodes continue to go a little bit higher, but this will be really cool because then you can see how your per episode growth changes to know that while I'm hitting 100 downloads in a day, when before it took five days to hit 100 downloads, or my next episode hits 100 downloads, or it hits on day one, it hits 105 downloads. So it's not the mythical downloads per time number because that's not completely accurate, but it is letting you see how quickly is your podcast episode reaching a particular number. And which to me sounds like some kind of gauge on subscribers, right? Because that number is hitting those, if it's hitting a number fast enough, it's because it's being auto downloaded by someone who's hit subscribe, right? Yeah, yeah. And also it's letting you see like the maturity point. That's kind of it is you get to see how quickly does the episode reach a particular maturity point. Yeah, cool. So I mean, we did mention obviously we went into the Apple stats. We should hit the chat a little bit. So someone asked in the chat about that, and they're asking, will Apple data be good or bad, useful or not? Who's excited for the Apple data? I am because the one thing that I want are statistically significant, considering that most of your podcast audience, for most podcasts doesn't apply to everybody, comes from Apple, the app specifically a lot of times, but from Apple that you can measure from one place and length of listen, which is critical. In my point, in my perspective, for really knowing how you're doing, work we have actual ads we put in there. And I mean, it's all our own stuff. It's promotional, it's marketing, whatever. We would know better where to place those, that's for sure. We could see if at the point where we put in some promotional thing, we break from content, are people dropping off. YouTube gives you this kind of data and it really helps. Now it's gonna be depressing for a lot of people. A lot of people are gonna see that they're 1,000 downloads. Yeah, you got maybe 300 of those. They don't stick around past two minutes. I mean, so, you know, good, I think overall for podcasting is gonna be a little hard on some podcasters. I think it's gonna separate the men from the boys. Yeah, I mean, it's really gonna tell you. And the question, the thing is, it's not like it's public, right? No one's gonna know it. You're still gonna say, people could still say they had X amount of downloads and they could in theory prove it, but then people are gonna say, well, show me your audience retention numbers. Cause that's actually, YouTube figured this out. YouTube, you know, they still show you a view count, but that's not what matters at all on YouTube. It all is about audience retention and watch time, right? Who cares if you had a million people watch two seconds of your video? I'd rather have 100 people watch the whole two minutes, right, which is better. So it's going to be all about watch time. So Apple's gonna give us some of that. If you don't know that, in theory we're gonna get length of listen. We'll see how that works out. Daniel, you have a screen up. Yeah, this is the previous slide. So slide 75 in their PDF presentation, which I posted in the chat room for anyone watching. And it will probably be in the show notes too. So you can follow along. You'll see the same kind of thing, like what Ray was just describing, you will always see a drop off in the first couple of seconds or so probably. You'll probably always see a drop wherever you do any kind of sponsorship or very long call to action. You'll always see a drop off at the end as people are deciding, oh, you're starting to wrap up. You know, these are the people who leave during the credits of the movie, those evil people. And we got to do what Marvel does, right? We got to sneak in extra stuff at the end. Yeah, exactly. And you'll always see in general the trend go down the longer your episode goes, not is but goes, the more people drop off. That's important. I don't know if you guys caught that, but it's, you know, a three minute episode is still going to see decline, right? Over even an hour and three minute episode. So what I worry is going to happen is the public radio people are going to get this data and they're going to say, oh, well the perfect length of a podcast episode isn't 22 minutes, it's actually 13 and a half minutes because look at this data that we see. And my response to that would be, no, your shows are best at 13 minutes, not everyone else's. Yep, yep. So I'm thumbs up. What else, is that the only stat? Sean, is that the only stat we're getting from Apple? As far as I know, I'm not completely versed in everything, but I think we've covered all of the really important stuff. Yeah, you'll get some segmentation with it probably, like you might be able to see, okay, everyone from Brazil, how much of my episode do they listen to or look at of people who are subscribed versus people who are not subscribed. Yeah. And some of this information we have just in different platforms and that's the big difference. This is going to be Apple. I mean, I'm looking at my Stitcher stats and I'm going to say maybe 3% of my audience comes from Stitcher. That in itself is eye-opening, because I have one episode that the completion rate for people who listened longer than 15 seconds is 52%. That's when you go, ouch, ouch. So I think that's where some people, and I'm with Daniel, I'm afraid everybody's, all of a sudden, you know, everybody's going to do a seven-minute podcast and I'm, no, because it- Any reasons. Well, yeah. There's a lot of hype right now. I've talked to a few people who are really thinking that, well, now that there's this support for these season tags, you know, within the Appleosphere that, well, now they have to do a podcast in seasons. It's like you don't have to do that unless it's relevant. That's the only time you should do it. Yeah. Because to me, if you listen to any late night TV show, you know, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, whoever, they all do seven-minute interviews, because I've heard a few people that'll make a joke like, hold on, we got another seven minutes or whatever. And so, and if you think about it, all those interviews are usually typically pretty lame. That's, you know, tell me a story about your kids on vacation. Okay, let's roll the clip. Thanks for coming. See you bye. Yeah. And that's the thing about, you know, stats, and we've got some conversation in the chat about obsessing over stats. And you have to be careful how much you let that control the content, right? Exactly. You put that content first. And yeah, the stats can give you some guidance. Stephen said, like, he, you know, if he sees a flat line, maybe he'll bring on a big guess. But, you know, don't dramatically change your show. Don't take your 40-minute show and kind of a seven-minute show. If that's A, not what you want it to be, or, you know, talk to your audience. And you want to make a change like that, you should probably talk to your audience. Stephen, are you excited? Do you know about, did you know these stats are coming from Apple or are you stoked about that or? Yeah, I do. They're coming. I listen to all your shows. I feel like I'm in the Valley of the Giants here. You know, sorry, I don't have my voice at God for you, but... That's how we keep the man, the little man down, right? Keep us down. I actually have a setting that makes the guest audio not as good as ours. But no, I've been keeping up. I do not, well... Okay, I have a question. Cool. How many shows did it take before you stopped obsessing over your stats? I'd say for me, it was probably 15, 16, before I was like, eh, I'll just look at them once in a while. So I was kind of curious where you guys were at. Why? Well, before you move from that, tell me why did that change for you? What changed it? Just you get sick of looking at them and worrying about, oh, I only got, you know, I got 10 fewer downloads this week. And it's like, well, so what? It doesn't point to that. Wisdom happened. You realize that it's futile to obsess over 10 more or 10 less or you realize it's not going to have hockey stick growth. You've been watching for the last 15 episodes and no explosion happened, right? So you're going to check in once in a while and maybe be pleasantly surprised if you see something crazy. But for me, you know, it's a good, everyone who starts, you're going to upset. You want to see, put something out there or is anyone listening, right? And it's super exciting when that number goes by two or five or 25, you go out of your mind, right? Like hit your email list. Hey, we're grown, we're, you know, so... That's fun because when you first start off, and you get 10 downloads and the next one you get 15, it looks huge. It's motivating. Yeah. It is huge, it is huge. Cause you're saying something and people are checking it out. And then the problem is if you lose then two of that, you go down to 13, again, it looks gigantic because it's whatever at that point, 40% of your audience or something like that. So I think that's maybe why new podcasters get a little hung up on it. Cause any change is going to be, it doesn't take anything to double your audience. I went from four to eight. And again, Emily makes a good point. You know, when we say four to eight, those are people, they're not just numbers. So then that is something to be excited over. But I think that's also why, maybe why a new podcaster can kind of get a little obsessed with that because any little change is going to make a huge difference on your graph. And that's the flip side, I think, is that we don't give up, but we don't obsess as much. And later on that number becomes 100 or 1,000 and I think at some point you pull back because you do start to just see numbers at some point. I think where you see 1,000 and 1,000 when you started would have been insane to you. And now it becomes sort of normalized. And then like Emily said, you realize at some point you're like, whoa, that's 1,000 real people. And when do you realize that? When someone says it to you, like in a tweet, when you connect the human to the number, and then you change again, you think those numbers, you're like, oh my gosh. And then it almost gets scary because you're like, wait, there's 1,000 people in a room listening to me every week, it's crazy. That's one of the reasons I really like reading the podcast reviews in my podcast as well as getting to know the podcasts that my audience hosts. It's because it's now, I feel like reading those reviews for me is getting me to know my audience even better than direct emails from my audience. And maybe I'm just weird with that. But like I'll discover these amazing podcasts my audience are hosting themselves, or I'll discover incredible niches or really creative cover art or these incredible things that these are people out there and realize that public speakers, pastors, many of them would do all kinds of crazy things to try and get half your audience into their building on a regular basis. And you might even have more influence than the most, quote, influential people, unquote, that you're directly connected with. Yeah, bangs in the chat says, I expect many podcasters to be very unhappy with the release of Apple stats, which would be ridiculous. I get it, right? Like it's disappointing to you to find out that your 1,000 is really 200 because people aren't sticking around. But hopefully, do you wanna be fooled? Do you wanna fool yourself? I mean, then you just don't look at your stats or hit some point. Why would you be unhappy of reality? I get it, right? Reminds me of when I was in a band and somebody would take a video of it and you actually get to hear what you sound like and what you look like and you're like, ooh, that was kind of flat and that was, you know, it's really gonna be who has the attitude. You know, Daniel was talking about episodes coming to maturity. It's gonna see if podcasters can come to maturity and go, mm, you know what? Maybe I do need to tweak this a little bit. So I think some of us, it's art, man. Don't make me change my art. So, which is fine, but just don't get upset when you're doing a three hour show with 15 minutes worth of material. Yeah, and that's the beauty is like, it's still your decision, man. It's still your podcast, do what you want. Like, it doesn't matter, nothing matters. Yeah, I think you need to remember why you started your show. You know, we've had some big guests on and our numbers exploded, but we never heard anything back. We never got any feedback. We've had other episodes where the numbers were half, but we've gotten tons of, hey, thank you for that show. It's just what I needed to hear at that time. And that makes it worth it, because I mean, I don't make a living podcast thing. It's my hobby. So just, I would say remember why you started your show. Yeah, that's a fantastic point because it can, I think again, in the numbers, these things get lost. The people get lost. The reason you started gets lost. People don't want to change things because it was almost like having a, the job you have in a teenager and you got promoted a couple of times, you make good money and you're like, I don't want to leave the jobs, they make good money, right? And you get stuck, right? And a podcaster can get stuck too, settling into like a comfort zone. And they don't want to, they're scared of those stats going down almost, right? And I think sometimes we get so focused on the stats we forget about the impact that you're making on the way home from Pittsburgh. I was listening to Harry Doran podcast junkies. He was interviewing Natalie Eckdahl, this ties in who told a story about how her daughter listened to Daniel's once podcast and she had sent in some feedback and Daniel then mentioned it on the show and Natalie explains how all of a sudden she thought there was something very wrong because her 15 year old daughter screamed like she had dropped something on her foot or something and it was because Daniel had actually mentioned her on the show. So you do have an impact on people. I think we forget that sometimes because we're, all our stats went down a wee bit. Yeah, but of the people, let's look at the, instead of looking how far it went down, don't forget the fact that that stat is still based on something green or blue or yellow. There are people listening and the people that are listening, you are having an impact because otherwise it wouldn't be there. But Dave, the voice of the podcaster here, but Dave, if I don't have enough downloads, I can't make as much money from a sponsor. And then that would be, then that's actually that ties right into what I was gonna say because that would be kind of your fault, right? Because you're not doing the job of explaining the power of podcasting as Dave says. One subscriber probably equals, I don't know what, 1,000 website visitors maybe because people come to a website maybe once they leave. One subscriber means something completely different in a podcast, even means something completely different than YouTube. YouTube, you can have subscribers and I think people use the subscribe button like a like button. We don't have our like button, I want one. If we didn't get that in iOS 11, did we? Come on, I want the like button. Let's do that, Apple. But people subscribe to a podcast because they wanna hear the next episode and the one after it, one after that. So when you get someone to press subscribe, it means so much more because part of that podcasting is not easy. It's not easy to produce necessarily. It's certainly not easy to do on a regular basis over time but it's still not the easiest thing to get. You have to work a little bit. So that subscriber is usually so much more powerful than one of anything else that you're measuring on the web. And even if you are looking at the dollars of things, let me use myself as a customer example of something else, a podcast movement 2016. Someone introduced me to this guy called Mike Morrison. He hosts the membership guys podcast. I have a podcast membership website for podcasters, podcasters society. And I thought, oh, a podcast about membership sites? Yeah, I wanna check this out. So I checked it out. After meeting this guy personally, I checked out his podcast, started listening and liked it, appreciated the value, heard him talk about he has a membership site for membership site owners. So what's a meta guy like me gonna do? I have a podcast about podcasting. I'm gonna join a membership site about membership sites, duh, of course, why not? So I joined it, so there I've become a paying customer. And then Mike advertises, hey, we're gonna do this thing in conjunction or co-located at social media marketing world that we're gonna do a membership marketing intensive by this ticket for this separate event. And we're offering it to our membership site members first at a discount before we offer it to our podcast listeners. I jumped on that thing right away. There were only 12 guys there or 12 people there and I got to be one of them and I learned so much from that and then there came the opportunity to join the membership site as a yearly member instead of a monthly member and then save. I decided, yeah, I get enough value from it. I'm gonna go ahead and commit to a full year at a time. So I signed up for that. So the point is I'm one person and I've now represented hundreds of dollars, if not maybe even thousands because I've referred other people to the same website. I've referred Dave, I've referred, I know at least five other friends who have joined because of my referral to the site. And I was one person responsible for all this income to that podcaster. And why did you refer him? Because of the value I get from him. That's it, exactly. And I was looking for, I was gonna switch the back end of the school, podcasting was in the middle of this thing and I was trying to figure out which was the best tool and Daniel goes, oh, this guy has this cool PDF. It breaks down all these different things and I signed up for that one piece of information. And from there I was like, wow, this is really cool. So it all starts with value and Mike's a great guy. I met him at podcast movement actually the last two years I've run into him. So he's a great guy. So we talk about, I think someone alluded to sort of the big ones for getting stats, blueberry, lips and pod track. But why, how do we know? The good stats versus bad stats? How do we know these are the places to get them? Like, Sean, why would I trust blueberry stats? I think the first thing to look at is, is the stats provider IAB compliant? And that's new though. So that is new, but the kind of the concept of the IAB actually goes back quite a ways. There was, geez, I don't know, 10 years ago I think there was the association of downloadable media. And that was kind of the first attempt to create a standards community, if you will, for podcast measurement. And it kind of fizzled out. So the IAB kind of rose out of the ashes of the ADM. And there's a whole bunch of different companies and organizations that are on the committee for IAB and try to come up with a standardized way to track podcast downloads. And the only companies that I know of off the top of my head that are actually IAB compliant are Libsyn, Blueberry and PodTrack. I don't know if any of the other kind of known providers out there are. And I would say one of the keys is that they already were before these stats. I mean, you had the association from downloadable media, but Blueberry, Libsyn, but they already were putting the effort. It's all about filtering, right? And when we talk about filtering, people know that means. But download is not just a download. Yeah, there's some really odd things that can happen when a device, whether it's a smartphone, a web browser, what have you, goes to quote, download a media file. It may make a number of requests to actually get all of the data that's included in that file. And if your stats were based on, every time a single IP address or what have you, goes to download that data in chunks, well, if you counted every one of those as an actual download, that would massively inflate your numbers. So the IAB works to kind of create these filters so that the stat companies are making sure that, okay, that is only one device that's downloading that, even though maybe the device sends through five, 10, 50 requests before it actually gets the entire file. Because ultimately, everybody hopefully wants to have actual accurate numbers that truly represent the audience and not just inflation for the sake of inflation. Right. And for me, the most important part is that Blueberry, Lipson and Potra, they understand this. Yes. And they are podcast companies who get it and they're working to actively to do the proper filtering, to measure them accurately. You wanna know, right? People are gonna be disappointed when Apple stats come on because it's going to be reality. And so who cares? Like who cares what the number is? Take that number and build on it, right? So, okay, so you rewind. You had 500 before and now you have 400 people who actually listened to 75% of the podcast. So what? Like awesome, you have 400 people who listened to the same 500, make it better and now make it grow back to 500. I mean, it doesn't matter, right? The number is really just a number. I wonder how many companies and such are going to stop seeing the importance of a download metric from Lipson, Potra, Blueberry, anyone else who implements the IAB standards because with Apple releasing stats, everyone's going to flock to that and see that as this is the golden standard because this is attached to a user anonymized, yes, but it's attached to a user so that if it's the same Apple ID account on your iPad, on your iPhone, on your iPad mini, on your iPod touch, it's all tracked as one person and the consumption is tracked. So- They still have to filter all that. We don't know that they're going to do that accurately. They might not need to filter it. That's the thing is that because their filter is the entry point, the app itself. So like the kind of filtering that Blueberry and these other companies have to do is bots, it's multiple IP addresses from the same device, it's networks that download from the same IP address where there are maybe 100 completely different users on the same network at an office or college or something and so they're downloading. So that's the kind of stuff these download metrics providers have to filter for. Apple doesn't have to because they have the direct connection to an anonymized but specific user. The key for me is like, I don't care where you get your stats. Like if I was from an advertiser perspective, what I would make you show me is two sets of stats. Show me your Lips and Numbers and your Blueberry Numbers. It doesn't mean much to me coming from one place. Do those match, right? And do they meet IAB standards, which is a good metric because we know they're trying to do that. Do your Apple, it's all part of the equation but it can't be everything, right? So bring in your Apple Numbers and compare it to your Lips and Numbers and then make some calls based on that, the two. The Apple number is gonna have an asterisk as well. I haven't checked in a while. What percentage does Apple have listener-wise? Is it dropped? But it's still like 60 to 70%? So it's a big chunk, absolutely nothing to sneeze at but it's gonna have to say, which I guess at that point you can say the majority of my listeners. Here's that kind of thing. And that's where Google would ever get their act together. I don't know that they would ever whittle away at that but it'd be nice if they even tried. And considering that it is a majority audience, it's probably also a good representative majority. We often quote from Edison Research in their studies that they do and they do all of this hard work to try and make sure that they have a statistically representative portion of Americans, so they survey 1,000 or 2,000 people and from that they extrapolate to say, well based on this representative statistically valid, whatever their actual term is, sorry. That's what I use, I'm a sociologist so I come from this world. So that's why it's important to me that it's a number that you can extrapolate statistically and apply to other things. But that's why I'm saying don't take it for everything. Yeah, so from 1,000 they get the entire population of the US and I think though we're looking at a majority audience using a podcast app. Yeah, not the best podcast app, sure. And yeah, it's only iOS devices and you could make different assumptions to say, well maybe Android users are so nerdy about their podcasts that they listen to the entire thing or maybe they're so disconnected from podcasts that they drop out after two minutes if they get bored. I don't know, you could look at conditions like that but still knowing generally 60 to 70% of your audience how they consume it, that could be really helpful to make decisions if you want to. Do you think podcasters are gonna push people now to listen in the podcast app? They already do. They already do, yeah. I mean, cause they wanna be new noteworthy Dave. Yeah, they wanna rank. And they wanna rank better. I mean, whatever, that stuff will never stop, it's fine. I think the important thing is what you guys have already said what do you use your stats for? And it's to look for trends, right? All this stuff is still gonna be, it's also gonna come back to the same thing. Am I making content that people are listening to? Well, is it more downloads? That's what we're looking at now. Now it'll be listen to longer, right? Or, you know, am I giving, you know, Dave you're always talking about that don't make it any longer than it should be, right? We're talking about episode length how long should I make my episode? And you're like as long as it needs to be. So, you know, if you made a 15 minute episode and the majority consumed most of it, you know you're holding their attention. If everyone's bailing on your 30 minute podcast that halfway through, there's probably a reason. Something another half just isn't landing with the audience. Yeah, yeah. So look at your trends, right? For any of this, am I trending up? Or at least am I holding? Am I not just falling off a cliff where I can be like something went wrong, right? But as podcasters, we always wanna grow a little bit. And there are those times when you know that you're going to lose people out of certain thing but you still decide to do it anyway because it fits in. It's like, I'm sure Dave and I both probably lose a certain percentage of our listeners whenever we refer to our Christianity. And that's just, that's a thing. We've accepted that. And I know that when in my once upon a time podcast when there's a moral issue on the TV show and I decide I'm going to comment on it, I know I'm going to get feedback. I know I'm going to get some negative reviews. I know I'm going to lose some of my audience. But telling the full story and being authentic and sharing the message that I think needs to be shared is more important. Not really saying it's more important than one person out there but it's more important than- It's more important than being popular is what is important than that. For sure, I mean, I lose a listener to my other show every time I do this damn show because they someone discovers that, hey wait, I think they said Dave and Daniel both have a show like Raise and it's regular. So then like they don't listen to that show anymore. So like who cares? Like, I mean like whatever. And by the same token, I gain listeners, right? Dave will mention the round table on school podcasting or Daniel and we gain a listener to the round table. So, you know, just take it in stride. I mean, Steven, do you worry about your stats versus doing something, do you ever do anything in your show you think, ah, that's going to cause me to lose listeners? You know, there's the, I hope this gains listeners but what about losing listeners? Fellas, we at the Heartland running podcast are on a mission. We're looking for that first piece of hate mail or bad review. We've got a party set up, ready to go. So we're trying to offend. It's, it's, it's assessment work. You don't have a one-star review yet? No one-star review yet? I probably shouldn't. We could hook you up. I'm going to say, I'm going to say. We're a show ever. I'm looking it up right now. But he's not looking it up on his Apple podcast app because he can't do a review there. Boom! You can, you can. They fixed it very quickly. They fixed it. Wow. Just, just see this is privately brought up. Bill, this is news. So who cares about stats? We can do a review from the app. Yeah. In the other fun thing, I don't want to derail off of stats. I found out today that when you share, Oh, it shares. But when you what? When you share, if you're listening to an episode and you click the share button, it sends them to your iTunes linking. Not your, not the page, not the website. It sends them to your iTunes thing. And I was like, well, that'll boost subscriptions. Well, it's always done that. Is it? Okay. Maybe I'm thinking of overcast. That could be. All right. Well, never mind. No news. You're saying if I share, if I share a podcast from the app, like I tweeted out from podcasts. Yeah. The link will open up someone else's podcast app. Right. Yes. In theory. At least that's what I saw today. I didn't realize it wasn't new. So shame on me. Well, we can do a review in the apps what you're saying Daniel. Yeah. Yeah. And it's now not only in the catalog what everyone was used to before, but it is now from your subscriptions. You can write a review and leave a rating for the podcast you listen to. And you can also see people also listen to other podcasts. So like I looked at mine today when I did a webinar and at the bottom of my own podcast, The Audacity to Podcast, the top two podcasts that say you might also like, you could probably guess, school of podcasting and surprisingly not podcasters round table, but podcasters studio. That is surprising. I would have expected to be the round table is number four. Wow. So, okay. So thank you, Apple for listening to this show because I've ranted about that several times. I've given you the idea a countless times saying this is the single best way. It still was the best discovery engine. You guys want that discovery. And now that you can do reviews in the app clearly your stats are going to go up, right? More reviews means more downloads. No, it doesn't. But anyways, that's really cool. I found it interesting that maybe that's what they meant. Apple's, it said after a while it learns what you like and it's going to make suggestions. I think it's that. It's the same old engine iTunes has had forever. And again, it's the single best engine I've ever seen because it does put shows in front of you. They're like, oh, I would like that too. Check it out. And you know, they might start using these new stats to help better make those connections. They may even, I think it's very reasonable to assume and I don't have insider information on this, but it's reasonable to assume Apple may adjust their algorithm may, may, may, may, may, may, may. I want to emphasize that. So don't quote me saying they will, but they may change their ranking algorithm to rank instead podcasts where people listen to the majority of the episode or more people listen completely straight through this episode, something like that. I could very easily see them doing that because after all, that's the way YouTube works. And that's one of the reasons, very small soapbox here. That's one of the reasons I'm so against putting fake video on YouTube, which is where you put only audio in just a screenshot or something like that in YouTube is because that audience retention is horrible. It's plummets within the first 30 seconds to almost nothing and YouTube sees that and YouTube bases their ranking of videos based on how long people watch the video. So if people pop out after only a couple seconds of the video, YouTube will see this is horrible, don't rank this. I think Apple could start doing something similar. Dave wants to say something. Apple, Apple, Amazon is doing the same thing now with Kindle books where they're ranking it by how many pages were read. From what I understand, I mean something similar. Apple's already had like really good algorithms in place for their apps that just haven't applied it to podcasting, right? They've done probably, so they've got it. It's in the engine. It really seems like Apple first puts things in the app store and then eventually those concepts trickle into podcasts, which is why I keep thinking they'll eventually allow podcasters to buy an ad inside the podcast app kind of like you can in Overcast because you can do that with the app store. I think you'll be able to do that someday with podcasts. Yeah, and in the chat, Banks also says, Apple can't make an IP. He says it doesn't seem there's no reason why Apple can't make an API call available to ISO app makers to let Overcast, CTL report their stats to Apple if the dev wishes. They are gonna report back, right? Dave, you're gonna get, or is it only gonna be through Podcast Connect or is Apple going to send these through to Lipson as well? You know? You just talked about two different directions. All right. So my brain missed. An API could go one way or the other. So what Banes is talking about is Overcast reporting back to Apple, how much of an episode people consume. I wasn't thinking that way, okay. All right, I gotcha. I'm talking about the stats coming from Apple. Yeah, then there's the other way where Apple sends the stats back to Lipson. So Lipson can include your consumption and analytics. Yeah, because for that to work, because there are companies that are the awesome, there are a couple of other ones that are saying, we can show you how much people are listening to your show, but to do that, you have to use their player. Well, the minute somebody listens on Overcast or the podcast app or a Pocketcast or any of the eight million apps out there, that stat goes right down the toilet. So you end up again with about maybe the ones I've tested, it's like one to maybe, if you're doing great, 3%. All right, but it is. Those players are on your website. Is Apple going to, those numbers that Apple are going to give them, are you going to have to log in to Podcast Connect or am I going to be able to just go to Lipson and get these numbers too? I think at this point it's going to be Podcast Connect. Do you know? Yeah, I'm very sure. Well, it'll definitely be Podcast Connect first. Yeah. Yeah, the only thing that I've heard so far is it's all going to be within Podcast Connect if there's any talk of them opening that up so that companies like Lipson or Blueberry can then pull that information over into your stats. I haven't heard anything about that yet. Yeah. Cause some companies who's like Spotify, there were some companies that Stitcher used to have to go to Stitcher to get some stats, right? You don't get length of Litson through what is sort of sent to companies, but you do get downloads, right? Yeah. You can see how, you can't see where they cut out, but you can see how far they made it through. In Lipson? In Stitcher, you mentioned. Right. There used to be Stitcher didn't send any numbers. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they finally, there's only a few left. There's SoundCloud, Google Play Music. I didn't even bring up the SC. Yeah. We didn't notice we didn't mention as a good place to go and get stats. No. It's a good place to go buy stats. Dave and Sean do support in the, both the audible size and the head shaking are going from those two to Circle gets a square. So they're that bad? SoundCloud? Yeah. Well, they've only lost almost 400 million. They've laid off 40% of their work for it. Yeah, but the stats, are the stats at that? Just Google the phrase buy SoundCloud place. And the last time I checked, you could get about 2,000 for three bucks. Ooh. Yeah. Let me go get some stats. So now put yourself in the shoes of an advertiser and you go, okay, great, tell me about your downloads. And somebody goes, look, we have 10,000 downloads. Right, because you can, if you're happy, you can fool yourself, that's fine. But we're talking about when you have to report to someone else. Maybe your boss, right? Maybe you're doing a podcast organization. You want to make yourself look good. You're like, man, we are picking up numbers. And any smart organization will be like, oh, good. So when we do a call to action, how many people actually click the link? Not so many. SoundCloud itself, I believe about three years ago, they actually broke out, they intentionally broke out web plays from downloads through RSS because they knew that those web plays were not legitimate. They were being gamed and bought and everything. So it's pretty much the direct acknowledgement right there that their stats are probably not that reliable. We mentioned Squarespace earlier and using third-party stats. You can actually, to SoundCloud's credit, very easily use a third-party stats tracker like Blueberry or PodTrack. So, I mean, I got to give them at least a little bit of credit for being open to that in acknowledging that maybe people want actual podcast stats instead of whatever it is that they provide. Yeah, that's good. And I mean, it comes back to the having a source to check it against, right? And that's cool. It's good that they let you do that because you do, I think I want to have something to compare. Even for myself, I mean, because Blueberry, you can get the free version, right? So that's a great thing. PodTrack, those are great things to add in addition to even if you have lips and stats, right? It's nice to compare something against something against something else to know. If you're using lips and you can have and you want Blueberry stats, you just email support because you get a little link from Blueberry or PodTrack and just say email support and go, I would like this added to my prefix and it takes all of 15 seconds. So that, it does it for you all the time? Yeah, basically. So it doesn't matter. You'll see when you go to get the direct link to an MP3 or if it's in the player, it's from that point forward every, your entire back catalog is now going to be tracked by both sets. This is just another reason. So I didn't even know that. And that's another reason why we talk about podcast companies that are doing things for podcasters who understand the space. These two are competitors. We talk them all the time, sounds like we're just total shills, but it's for a reason. It's because things like that, I mean, they're hooking you up with what you need as a podcaster. I think that's cool. So promo code, no, just kidding. I won't even tell you. All right. Well, we are reaching towards you. And I forget it. I'm going to keep going. Are there any stat myths? Daniel, you're big on myths. Do we have any myths about stats that you can think of? I kind of toss that off. I'll take it first. Looking at your stats will not make them grow. There's a lot of jokes there, Dave. Yeah, anything you hear people, Sean, anything you hear people talking about where you're just like, no, that's not right. I think that the big thing I hear a lot is, well, I just released an episode. And this could be a matter of, I released an episode an hour ago. I released an episode 24 hours ago or a week ago. And why are my numbers as high as they should be? Or as high as I think they should be. And if people get really pushy about that, we can act at Blueberry, we can do an audit. That really doesn't happen that often because usually there's a logical explanation like, oh yeah, you just released your last episode the day before Christmas or something like that. I mean, you can usually track that kind of stuff down to something explainable, but that one comes up a lot. As far as myths are concerned, I don't really know of anything specific. Obviously we advise against all the usual stuff. Thankfully it feels like Twitter bombing has kind of gone to the wayside. I feel like we haven't had to have a conversation about that in a while. Or someone will ask us, well, why can't all of my players autoplay? Why doesn't the media player autoplay? Why isn't there an option for that? And we have to explain to them, yeah, that's a really great way to inflate your numbers. And we don't believe in that. So we don't allow you to do it with our technology. I think you do because my numbers got really inflated and it can only, I'm still going back to my own personal issue with my numbers. I'm not believe, the funny part is I don't believe my own numbers. There's no way it's happening. Emily. Yeah, I was gonna bring that up. What is it, Dave? Emily from thestorybehindpodcast.com says you can't get sponsors unless you have X amount of downloads. That's a good one. We've proven that wrong. And that's my, the other myth I see quite often is the downloads per time period. Per day, per week, per month, whatever it is, it's a completely meaningless number. Because I can tell you, here's the secret. I'll tell you how to, in a month, double, literally double your downloads in a month, publish twice as many episodes. Boom. Your head probably exploded. And your audience doesn't even have to grow and you can double your download numbers. So, what's important then? What's important is you look at a single episode. Not all of your episodes in a certain amount of time. It's you look at one single episode and then you can look at that in a certain amount of time. But still, you have to take into consideration things like what time did you publish? Like, if you're gonna look at your episode today and you published it at 9 p.m., your downloads for today are gonna be very low but your downloads tomorrow will be really high. That doesn't mean that you should publish tomorrow. You have to let things smooth out. There's some term, I'm sure, normalize, maybe, or something else. You have to let them even out, normalize or reach maturity before you actually trust what those numbers are because it could be like the Christmas thing. What if you had a whole bunch of subscribers in Florida and those poor people are without power for a while and they don't have Wi-Fi. They're not downloading podcast episodes. They're not listening to them. Maybe you see a drop. Maybe they listened to your podcast afterward or holidays, things like that. So you really have to let things settle before you can trust them. What number do I want to report then? Ideally, your downloads for a single episode about four weeks after it's been published. Right. Oh, consistently. Do that, get that number and then for the next, yeah, do that for the next six, seven, and then average it out or so. Like Dave said, you could put it on a spreadsheet and then track it that way or just kind of keep it in your mind. It's something like this. Does it look like it's hitting the same number? So, and then you can average that out because you will have the occasional home run episode or maybe you get featured somewhere or something like that. Back in 2015, Stitcher featured the Audacity to Podcast a few times on their front page and one episode got 75,000 quote downloads. But it was really just Stitcher. Every time someone listened to the 30 second excerpt on Stitcher, they were sending back a ping to the stats which would then say this episode was downloaded. So I had to just ignore my Stitcher numbers for a few months. Steven, is there any stat you wish you had? That's a tough question, Mike. Just come up top of your head, but is it? Podcast related, right? Yeah. Maybe not. I think it would be nice to know how long people are listening and hopefully with the new Apple stats that'll happen. So I mean, you need to make the show you wanna make but I also wanna make a good show. So if I know people are, you know, 45 minutes is about their threshold. I don't wanna push it much beyond that. So I think that's gonna be the most helpful one. I would love to see how many new, like how many people that was the first time they listened to the episode. Cause you see like 2000, let's say you have 2000 downloads and that was unique per episode. Well, not so much unique to just like, how many of those are, you know what I mean? How many people have been listening for years? And how many people was exactly first time listener? First time long time. First time long time. I don't, I don't think you get that. And even, not even you two in theory, they should know if they've ever watched your channel. That that's actually doable for you to. Yeah. And that could be interesting. That's an interesting stat. I'd like to change my answer. I'd like that one too. We take your first answer. Sorry. We have the Jeopardy rules here. Sean, you kind of look like you had something on your brain there, but. No, no, I was just kind of going along with what everybody said. I really actually like Dave's idea. I think that would be really interesting data to have to kind of look at your numbers and go, okay, this percentage of whatever episode was people who listened for the first time. I mean, sometimes you can kind of gauge that. You know, you talked about if you have a big guest or something like that where you're going to see a big inflation based on that. And you kind of know that a lot of those are people that are listening for the first time. But then it would also be interesting kind of piggybacking on it to see, well, how many actually subscribed and stayed on for, you know, two or more episodes. That would be a really interesting trend to have. We always want people to subscribe, to rate and review, to share. I wanna know how many people actually share, right? A good call to action is to get people to share it. So if there's a share option in that app, how many people are using it and how do I get more people to share it? I'd like to know that. I still want my likes. How do people like my podcast episode? I want that. Yeah, cause one of the things that I now hear about is you are constantly getting new listeners and you're getting people that leave and then those people leave come back and then they leave and then they come back. It's weird because you'll talk to somebody that you know used to listen all the time and you'll maybe you mentioned something that was in a previous episode and you can tell by the look on their face they don't listen anymore. Cause they're not like going, oh yeah and the thing with the thing they're like, no, they have no idea what you're talking. And then I've had people say, yeah, I don't know. Nothing wrong with you. I just quit listening for a while and then they came back. So that is something that I now realize is going on behind the scenes. You're losing and gaining people all the time. Just because you know, there's only 24 hours in a day. Oh, people cherry pick, cherry pick episodes too, right? I'm sure, I mean, you know, I bet the biggest if Mark Marin could see those, that I mean like, I listen, I might listen to WTF like once and once twice a year because I see a guest. I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't want to hear that one but I'm subscribed. I don't auto download so it doesn't get that stat. But yeah, totally cherry picked. And as you said, Dave, 24 hours in a day, like we all, well at least people who listen to this show, I mean, I'll probably subscribe to a lot of shows and doesn't mean you get to listen to them all. So it is interesting, like why did you pick one or the other, right? Did the name, did the person's name in the title? Now we know that's, no, that's right. Did the person's name in the title versus the topic? And we're going through that at work. Like you want to prioritize the interviewee because you know that people would listen cherry pick by name or they're going to cherry pick by topic. I don't know. And you have limited space where you can put that information where it's going to appear in an app and make it easy. So that's a great question. Interesting stuff. A stat I'd like to see is some kind of campaign tracking or source tracking. So I could know of everyone who subscribed and downloaded where did they come from? Did they find me because of search? Did they find me because of round table or did someone mention me? That kind of detail, which I know that involves having to track them and that is a privacy concern. So I'm not actually asking for it, but it would be cool if that could be seen. Probably never will be though. Yeah, for sure. Well, so good. There's room to grow in the stats. Although again, we do you approach that line of how much you're measuring somebody anonymously. And Apple has been big to say that this is anonymous data. If we can have a timer like to the second showing how much time we have left in our magical eight weeks of new and noteworthy. Oh yeah. Time is up. Oh, and a renewed again magically. Oh yes. How did that happen? How did that happen? All right, well, I think we'll head on out. As we head on out, definitely let us know where we can find your podcast. If you have anything to add, go ahead and throw that in here. This is the part where our stats take a big drop. This is bad on me. I should not give any indication that we are going in. I should literally hit stop broadcast in the middle of my sentence. And then we'd have that stat would be like, ah, I didn't even know they were leaving. And we just have completion rates would be crazy. I'm gonna do that. Stop broadcast while we're talking. But anyways, we are heading out. The hardcore stay around. Thanks everyone. Emily in the chat of course, Gabe Gonzalez checked in. And John Moore was in early Mark from Australia. He's really, he really just traveled a long way. The chat room is bailing already. Yeah. We're clear we're out of here. We're one down. We have no more value to offer other than our thanks. Just remember Iron Man's gonna come out in a few minutes and recruit one of us to the Avengers. You'll want to stick around and see it. That's right. All right. So thanks again, Daniel. Where do you find your show? I'm Daniel J. Lewis from the Audacity to Podcast and I'll leave you with this tip. Don't think about the stats. Think about the people. Think about the content you want to give those people and make that content so good that you are the number one podcast to those people. Very cool. Dave. Dave Jackson School of Podcasting.com. I'm gonna piggyback on Daniel's and don't think about the people. Think about the person. Think about that one person that you're talking to and again, give them content that's so good they have to tell a friend. Yeah. Those people staring right back at me as I stared Dave's video because he's got the pictures on the wall which I've said before and I can see Ms. Eileen. So she's one person. I think she listens to this show. So yeah, you know, we give that tip as podcasters talking to people about podcasting. Sometimes, you know, the old tip is like, put a picture on your desk and talk to that one person or you know what I mean? I oftentimes think of one person, like a friend and that actually helps you be even more natural even when you're thinking about the person you can visualize one person or a couple people. It helps me be more me on the microphone whereas if you're just sort of behind the mic and you've got an outline, you're following it it feels more robotic. I don't know. That's a good tip. I think at least for me in my progress of being more just being ray on the microphone, right? Cause you change, you turn on the microphone you start to record, you put headphones on and it takes a little you out of the process. So Dave can just spin around and look at those people. And I think actually it does help. So good tip. And you start talking like this. Yes, Sunday, Sunday round table. I can't even fake it. Dave's got the radio voice. All right. Well, Steven doesn't have the radio voice but we got through our tech issues and they, Steven, thanks so much for joining us. Awesome pleasure being on. Sorry, my microphone wasn't working right. You can catch us over at the Heartland Running podcast and Ray, I'm gonna let my fan base knows on the show. So fame and fortune will be yours. Very sick. It's very awesome. I appreciate it. I should have got you in involved a lot more so they would actually stick around but tell them your best advice at the very end. Boy, put me on the spot. If you're afraid of looking stupid, you'll probably never accomplish anything worth mentioning to anybody. Nice. Dave likes it. No fear. I'm pretty chilling, brother. It was a big product when I was like a teenager. All these shirts had no fear on them. They were like really popular. If you're old enough, you remember those. No fear. It's a good flow. I like it. Sean, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Ray. The, I think, final thought that I have with regard to stats is simply obsess over your stats less, have more fun. And my name is Sean Thorpe. The best way to find me on the internet is you can go to my personal website which gets updated usually after I monitor things like podcast or show on the table but it's got a list of everything else I do. You can find that at Sean. That's S-H-A-W-N dot M-X. Very cool. Thank you so much. And yeah, another good one. Make sure you go over to podcastersaroundtable.com slash guest. If you are still here, if you're the stat, if you're the 2% on that chart, your other type of person would go over and sign up. So we want to see you on a round table. Make sure you sign up and we will see you for one, zero, two. Waving out of here. See you guys.