Making podcasting pay when the listening numbers don’t (yet) add up
Welcome to Unmade, mostly written on Wednesday on a crisp, bright day at Sisters Beach, Tasmania, and completed on an even crisper, brighter morning.
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Before I get to today’s topic – an in depth exploration of what we known about the state of Australian podcasting – a quick digression.
Yesterday, when I popped into my local Woolworths, I eavesdropped on an older couple discussing the cost of a leg of lamb. After talking it over, they decided to leave it. My guess is that it was typical of conversations happening in every supermarket in the country, as consumers weight up what they can – and, more to the point – can’t afford.
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The Australian Podcast Ranker, while a noble effort from the radio industry is very much like marking their own homework.
I notice there is no room for independent podcasts as well as next to no International podcasts unless they are represented by ad agencies or distributors locally.
I use Pocket Casts personally and the charts on their app for Australia are way different than the Podcast Ranker.
And do they still not let the ABC in the Podcast Ranker? The ABC would have to be one of the largest local podcast producers.
Craig Hutchison of SEN always touts his Podcast Ranker numbers for SEN and The Sounding Board (a great Australian media podcast mixed with sports analysis and recurring criticism of News Corp Australia). Yet I barely ever see those podcasts crack even the Top 100 most popular podcasts on Pocket Casts. And Spotify for that matter just to show I’m not 100% relying on Pocket Casts.
But a great analysis from you Tim. I think you are doing what you can with what the local radio/podcast industry release to the public.
If Marty Sheargold’s radio cume is 254k, and his podcast audience is 130k, isn’t his podcast audience “just over half” of the radio one, and not “just under a quarter” as you say?
My bad Gavin – sorted, ta!
And one quick note. In three places, I originally referred above to the radio ratings as being monthly cume. In fact it’s weekly cume. Now amended above.
Tim, “The download number is higher than the listener number by the way, because most listeners download multiple episodes of a show each month.”
Yes, that is 100% true. But don’t forget that the listener number is ‘the average day’, while the podcast is the cumulative downloads. Imagine what the ‘listener’ number would be if everytime you clicked on a station was counted!
Hi John, Thanks for that point. I presume you mean the cumulative listener number for radio (as opposed to the listener number for podcasting which is, as I understand it someone who downloads content at any point over the month).
Cheers,
Tim
Tim, my point is (to the best of my knowledge) that the downloads are counted and accumulate over the calendar month. A person may make a download of their favourite content each week – one person, four downloads. The download doesn’t appear to take into account the duration of the download, and the duration of the listening-time to the download. One second counts the same as one hour.
The broadcast radio equivalent would be each time a person tuned into a radio station would roughly be analagous (no pun intended) to a ‘download’. A loyal breakfast listener would typically have around 20 ‘tune-ins/downloads’ in a month. The audience figure from the radio diaries (paper and electronic) is the ‘average day’ across the duration of the survey. When a session is reported it is ‘weighted’ by the number of quarter hours – if you tune into half of a session you count as half-a-listener.