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” school of analytics.
Downloads can’t tell you:
How many people actually listened to your episode
How long they listened for
Whether they enjoyed it
What action they took next
How engaged they are with you as a creator or publisher
There is good reason you’d want to look deeper.
Unlike traditional broadcasting, podcasting is not a one-way street. As the Wondery (RIP) Fandom Phenomenon report says, podcast listeners feel a deep sense of connection with their favourite shows.
They develop feelings of warmth towards their favourite hosts, and thanks to platform mechanics like Spotify’s comments and polls, YouTube’s comment section, live-streaming and general social media, interaction is increasingly the norm.
And this engagement has concrete benefits. A new trends report from the Signal Awards explains this well:
“The more a fan is engaged with a podcast, the more likely they are to invest in its success longterm. They’ll pay for a subscription, turn their friends onto the show and support the creator wherever they show up.”
Anyone releasing podcasts – whether a global network or a bedroom creator – can benefit from deeper listener engagement.
At the most basic level, we do this to connect with people and have an impact, right?
But at a commercial and strategic level, passive consumers are weak.
We need to be engaging people to drive deeper relationship and action – whether that’s action to spend money on our products, or action to achieve a shared goal.
Even if you have no commercial goals for your show and are just doing it for a hobby… knowing people are engaging with your content makes it more fun.
Podcast engagement matters for business
The whole of my podcast career has been spent serving audiences within the context of large publishers.
All of the companies I’ve made shows for are over a hundred years old, and have modernised or transformed many times over.
Yet despite that process of repeated reinvention, here’s a hard truth: legacy media often struggles with the idea of audience engagement, or community.
The institutional model is so entrenched in a one-to-many broadcast model that building deep, engaged, human relationships is challenging.
Partly this is practical: it’s harder for a large brand to pivot and improvise as quickly as a solo creator or upstart young company.
But, if anything, legacy media should be first in line for systems of measurement that examine deep audience engagement – because that is exactly what is needed to protect an increasingly fragile business model.
Publishing faces a complex set of challenges: trust in media is declining; AI summaries are decimating search traffic and social referral are plummeting; rising costs mean users are making hard choices about the products they subscribe to.
A more deeply engaged audience can help to insulate against these risks.
And that is where podcasting excels.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are some key stats from industry reports conducted in the past few years:
Podcasts are trust engines
From the Wondery Fandom Phenomenon report 2024:
“Listeners feel a deep, personal bond with their favorite podcast hosts and shows. Those powerful connections between host and listener create an intimate, trustworthy environment that brands can leverage to engage with fans in record numbers.”
From Acast’s Podcast Pulse 2024:
“63% of listeners “trust the podcast hosts they listen to”, while “4 in 5 will consider a brand or product promoted by their favourite host”
Podcasts drive subscriptions
From the Ofcom report, Audio Listening in the UK 2025:
“two in five podcast listeners (38%) would be happy to pay for a subscription to their favourite podcasts”
Podcasts are a relationship you control
From the Reuters Digital News Report 2024:
“Almost two-thirds (63%) of our survey respondents say they are worried about a sharp decline in referral traffic from social media sites. Data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that traffic to news sites from Facebook fell 48% in 2023, with traffic from X/Twitter declining by 27%…
77% [of publishers surveyed] say they will work harder on building direct links with consumers via websites, apps, newsletters, and podcasts – channels over which they have more control.”
What to track instead
So if downloads are a crude measure, what metrics should you be tracking instead?
Here are three suggestions to get you started:
Direct interactions: comments, poll responses, reviews
Irritatingly Spotify doesn’t track interactions in a central dashboard, so you have to go into the relevant section in Spotify for Creators and keep count manually. Likewise Apple Podcast reviews. But it’s worth keeping an eye on, as this gives you a good idea of how driven your listeners are to make a manual action after listening to your show. Similarly, watch for interactions or mentions of your podcast on social media.
Listen time
Both Spotify and Apple provide total listen time per feed and per episode, and also allow you to drill down into an episode specific listen-through graph.
At the top level, it’s worth counting how long people are spending with your podcast overall (in the case of publishers, this time spent is likely to be many multiples of the time a user spends on your website!).
Then at the most granular level, it’s helpful to track your listen through on individual episodes to see how long people stick around for and which parts of the show make them switch off.
Episodes per listener per week
Without doubt one of the most insightful people on this whole topic is Dan Misener of Bumper, who writes persuasively about the value of episodes-per-listener-per-week.
This metric shows how “sticky” your podcast is, and whether it keeps people coming back.
As Jay Clouse often repeats, the purpose of each piece of content is to make the user more likely to consume your next piece of content. This metric helps you measure that.
No platform will track this natively, but Bumper have figured it out and you can track it in the Bumper Dashboard.
Track your True Top Episodes
Ultimately, the metrics you decide to track will depend on your own strategic goals. It can be tricky to monitor everything, and certainly pulling in analytics from different sources can leave you drowning in data.
That’s why I created the True Top Podcasts template. It’s a google sheet template that allows you to import your data from both Apple and Spotify, then – crucially – measure your podcast based on the metrics that are most important to you.
With the True Top Podcasts template, you can combine different metrics to create a custom weighting which reveals the episodes that have performed best according to your priorities.
Results are displayed with a useful heat map which allows you to see top performers at a glance, and spot any outliers which over perform in specific areas.
It’s completely free to all subscribers to Podcast Strategy Weekly. If you’re not signed up already, just hit subscribe and enter your email and I’ll send it over.
If you are already subscribed you should have the link in the welcome email you received when you signed up. Don’t worry if you can’t find it – just reply to this email with “DATA” in the subject line and I’ll send it again right away.
Podcast Crew update
As you know, I’m building Podcast Crew - a membership and recruitment platform - to make hiring in the podcast industry easier and faster for everyone.
Last Monday I opened the Podcast Crew platform up to an invite-only group of test users, who have been kicking the tyres and giving me loads of useful feedback. So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our test users have been saying things like “really excellent” and “it’s great - we really need this”.
Here’s a sneak peek at what the database will look like:
This week we’ll be putting the finishing touches to the first version, then – all being well – I plan to open it up to a public beta in very early September. It’ll be UK only at first, but we have plans to open it up in the future.
Podcast Crew will open first to the people who have been patiently waiting on the waitlist. The good news is – if you’d like to be among the first to get access, there’s still time to add your name. Sign up for the waitlist at podcastcrew.co.uk
Founding members
Finally, thank you once again to our amazing founding members who make Podcast Strategy Weekly possible.
They are:
Jeremy Enns from Podcast Marketing Academy: providing unreasonably detailed podcast marketing strategy to attract & convert buyers.
Simon Elliot, Crowdfindervideo: Grow and engage your audience with a video podcast.
Mondo Metrics: Cross-platform analytics for podcasters and media companies.
JumpLink: Track clicks, drive interactions, and monetize your show notes
Alitu & ThePodcastHost.com: Record, Edit & publish your show with Alitu (& learn how with ThePodcastHost.com!)
Suze Cooper: freelance audio journalist supporting publishers, news rooms and media outlets.
School of Podcasting. Want to start or grow a podcast? This is where you begin.
Podschool: Want to start your own podcast? Launch faster and sound better with this step-by-step online course.
Want your name in front of 1500+ podcast industry leaders - and access to member-only issues of Podcast Strategy Weekly? 👉 Become a founding member now.
That’s all for now. Thanks, as ever, for reading. If there’s a topic you’d like me to write about in a future issue, please reply to this email to let me know.
Until next time…
Chris