If downloads are dead, what's next?

Here's the podcast data you should be focusing on instead.

I’ve been writing for some time that the download is an increasingly unreliable metric for judging a podcast’s success.

It’s not wholly useless. At the New Statesman we track downloads as a proxy metric to show us the general direction of travel. It’s a useful shorthand. But it’s a blunt instrument that doesn’t go much beyond the “big number go up” schoo…