Podcasting Stats

Just when we are starting to figure out how to get decent stats on weblogs and RSS feeds, along comes podcasting.

In some ways, podcasting and blogging are similar.  The reader/listener has the choice to read the post on the web or in another application/device via an RSS feed.

In the case of the blogs, its in the brower or a feedreader.

In the case of podcasts its via a stream/direct download or in the iPod via iTunes.

I use LibSyn to host our Postively 10th Street podcast and I have to say the service is really good.

They have a stats page that I just found thanks to Jason Chervokas.  It’s right there on the top of the page, but whatever, sometimes I don’t look around enough.

I wish I could show a screenshot of their stats page but its rendered in Flash and I don’t know how to do that.

So I’ll just give you some basic statistics for our podcast:

Average Subs:    54 – this is the number of people subscribing to our feed
Average Direct Downloads – 157 – this is the number of people listening to a live stream of the show
Unknown Client – 45 – hits on our page/feed that Libsyn doesn’t know enough about

The reason this is interesting to me is that the direct downloads are 3x the RSS subs.

I think the RSS subs are all people who are downloading the podcast into their iPod.

Given the name podcasting, you’d think that most people listen to podcasts in their iPods.

But that’s not the case with our podcast and I suspect its not the case with most podcasts.

I have to run to do yoga, but I am going to blog more on this in the coming weeks as I think more about it.

Please feel free to chime in with your comments as I can use all your help figuring this stuff out.