Podcasters Feel Discouraged by Low Downloads

“Hate listens count as downloads the same as people who love the show.”

“I'd stick with RSS.com, their analytics are pretty solid and you're already established there”

“Yeah, Spotify is janky AF, and unless you're paying them, their support is useless. With regards to the listens, on the 'pod that's currently hosted on Spotify, we've seen hundreds of listens on YT in a few days, whilst Spotify pulled-in barely a dozen in that same time-frame. I guess it's the luck of the algorithm.”

“People have brought up the apple change but that was years ago. Something else is going on because I've seen the same thing but oddly enough, my podcast keeps moving up the charts on sites like Podstatus. It may be a glitch or the entire industry is shrinking.”

Yes, the back catalog has seen a significant drop. So that's part of it.

“that drop is brutal especially when you didn't change nothing on your end. i had something similar happen last year with my show and it turned out apple had changed how they count downloads on iOS 17, basically auto-downloads got way more strict. took me weeks to figure it out cause megaphone's analytics were showing the same raw numbers but the way they qualified a "download" shifted. youtube video shouldn't be punishing your audio feeds unless spotify is doing some weird”

“In the past month I've lost 7k downloads, which is nearly a 25% drop off. I've tries digging into my hosting platform (Megaphone) and I've looked to see if there are any changes in our top three platform's — Apple podcast, Overcast, or Spotify— reporting. Has anyone else seen this? We haven't changed anything about out content, posting schedule, or publishing process so I don't think it's organic. We are posting audio-only to spotify and apple but do have a video vers”

The metrics aren’t unified across all platforms

“It's probably this way because podcasting predates a lot of the sites/apps that show public numbers. Also, many podcasters want to keep their numbers proprietary as much as possible. Hence, download/play data is private. Podcasters that would like public numbers can use the OP3 stats system and share their stats publicly. That may be the only podcast stats system that allows it.”

“Do you want to display your metrics ? If so, you can use OP3. It’s open source. If it’s just an informational question, because it’s decentralized. Rephonic tries but it’s a variable guesstimate.”

“Anyone can go on YouTube and see exactly how many people viewed my podcast feed from there. Actually not quite. They can see how many "plays." But that's a nearly meaningless metric on YouTube. They can't see how many of those plays watched 20% or 100% of your videos. If you want your podcast stats to be publicly visible, you can use OP3 . But you can't see just anyone's podcast consumption numbers because that data defaults to private. Some apps might publicly display”

“They want it to be nebulous. Why are TV ratings a Nielsen sampling when every box can report back exactly what you watch and for how long? They don't want to be held liable to advertisers. Better it is a cloudy thing you can pick and choose what looks good to try and sell.”

“Rss is not just decentralized. I don’t think it was designed to deliver this type of data.”

“A day without downloads, especially towards the beginning of a show's existence, is not unusual. Weeks without downloads seems odd, unless you're doing absolutely no promotion at all of your show/episodes. (Disclosure: I work with the Blubrry support team.)”

“i'd trust trends inside the same host more than the absolute number. 20% growth there is useful, but 10k downloads from two systems may not be comparable.”

So, don't believe any of it?

“RSS is decentralized, so there isn't one platform seeing every play. hosts can publish download counts, but they're measured across servers and apps rather than by one shared counter like YouTube.”

“Anyone can go on YouTube and see exactly how many people viewed my podcast feed from there. I can plainly see my own analytics as well, but no one else can. Why are they not published for the public? Is there a specific reason? Youtube views and music streams and everything else is easily countable and available. submitted by /u/Barnestownlife [link] [comments]”

We switched to acast recently

“That’s actually reassuring to hear. I guess the numbers being all over the place is just part of building an audience, especially early on”

“I've used Megaphone for years, but the recent changes pushed me out. On top of the 90-second ad limit the OP mentioned (that should be the podcaster's call, not Megaphone's), they've also forced competitive separation on everyone. So if I have a sponsor in a category like "Business Software," they won't serve ads at the same time from any other sponsor in that same category. That makes no sense for a show like mine. I sell 100% of my sponsorships directly. No Spotif”

“We decided to migrate from Spotify at about 3500 monthly downloads across all platforms. We switched to Acast as they have much lower threshold for ads. I can confirm a drop in Spotify listeners, possibly because we are not allowed to publish videos there anymore due to Acast's TOC. Meanwhile our YouTube channel has tripled in average episode views lately. And overall audio listens is the same as before the switch. Now with only 3500 monthly listens you are essentially making coffee money wi”

“one thing worth checking before you switch, look at what percentage of your total listens are actually on spotify vs everywhere else. if spotify is like 80%+ of your audience you might lose more from the algorithm demotion than you gain from monetizing the other 20%”

“That’s life! Without proper promotion you end up with nothing….you’ll get used to it or at least I am”

“So I’m literally just starting out have three episodes but I started this past Monday so it’s going on a week. Is it normal to have entire days or weeks with zero downloads even with new content I am again just very, very new. submitted by /u/Melodic-Command-1866 [link] [comments]”

“the maintenance timing thing is so real, it always seems to coincide with release days somehow”

That's exactly what we are doing.

“It does seem muddier, doesn't it? B/c Apple is blowing away Spotify”

“Totally normal, most shows are near invisible until people have a reason to find them so don't read anything into it yet. Double-check the boring stuff (that it's actually live on the big apps, titles are searchable, etc) then just keep releasing.”

“Agreed. It took three emails to get them to even acknowledge it. We would switch platforms in a heartbeat if we had the time to recreate all the mid-roll ad slots. But, we're two person operation doing a lot more than just a podcast. So, we're stuck until we can free up some time to get this done.”

“Spotify's been a bit all over the place with their policies. It seems like they might still be testing things or rolling out changes gradually. I wouldn't be surprised if the email was just a heads-up for future updates rather than an immediate implementation. Keep an eye on their official announcements; sometimes they don't communicate changes very well.”

“Your update says the commercial number became the scoreboard by default, which is fair, it's the only one that's easy to count. But your other numbers say something most of this thread skips past: 4,000 downloads over 89 episodes is about 45 a show, and the people who do find it tell you they like it. That gap is usually distribution rather than quality, nothing is pointing new people at it. Worth checking where those 4,000 actually came from, because if it's mostly people who alread”