Buzzcast
Buzzcast is a roundtable discussion about podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. We'll cover current events and news, podcast strategy, tools we are using, and dip into the Customer Support mailbag to test our podcasting knowledge. If you want to stay up-to-date on what's working in podcasting, Buzzcast is the show for you.
Buzzcast
Understand Podcast Analytics Like A Pro!
Numbers don't tell the whole story of your podcast's impact—but understanding them can help you use analytics effectively while staying focused on creating the content you love. Tom Rossi joins Alban and Jordan to simplify podcast stats and what they actually mean for creators.
Whether you're trying to grow your show, attract sponsors, or simply understand your audience better, we're giving out actionable strategies for podcast analytics found in Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, Spotify for Creators, and YouTube!
Sound-Off Question: Tell us where you're listening from and one thing about yourself that statistics could never tell us!
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Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!
My magic mouse, like Apple magic mouse, the battery is this much. It's just a little baby bit of battery, so I'm just kind of like oh, you can just charge it while you're using it.
Tom:Why wouldn't you be able to do that?
Jordan:Yeah, I don't know why.
Tom:I'm sure it just dangles on the back of it or something.
Jordan:Or it goes in the front like a normal mouse.
Alban:No Of all the grief they got, they never redesigned it.
Jordan:No.
Alban:It really takes a certain level of like arrogance when everybody unanimously is like here's a issue you have.
Tom:Yeah.
Alban:A lot of people are then like okay, I guess I have to work on myself and figure this thing out. Apple is like no, no no, I don't know why you're charging your mouse in the middle of the day. You should just be charging that sucker up every night.
Tom:Yeah, Top it off. I mean to their credit, it does last a freaky amount of time.
Jordan:Yeah. It does.
Tom:Without a charge .
Alban:Yeah, but you know what never needs a charge, this bad boy.
Jordan:You're wired. What is that?
Alban:It's my gamer mouse. Is it a Dell mouse? No, a Dell mouse, Tom. This is a Razer Mamba wireless, but I use it wired Apparently. Bluetooth the latency for mice can never be as high as like a wired mouse, and once I used this I was like this is so nice, like you move your mouse and it's like perfectly smooth, in a way that nothing else has ever been smooth.
Jordan:So you're saying it was like better back in, like the early 2000s and 90s, before we had the wireless mice.
Alban:No, I don't think even no. The best mouse was the one with the. What was the ball on?
Jordan:the top. Oh my gosh.
Tom:I had a Logitech trackball.
Alban:Those are such bad mice.
Tom:I hated those so much. Oh so granular Gosh. I'm sure that I have arthritis as a result my thumb.
Alban:That was Starcraft. I played Starcraft on one of those mice.
Jordan:Oh, that's a deep cut, yeah, and.
Alban:I was not very good and I blame it on the mouse.
Jordan:Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. So Kevin is out this week, so we have our honorary co-host joining us, Tom Rossi. So, Tom, you're kind of like the stats guy at Buzzsprout and I was thinking it's been a while since we've talked about stats on this podcast. There's some new stats that have emerged as podcasting has grown, and so I thought we'd take this opportunity to deep dive into everything that we know about podcast analytics.
Tom:I don't know how I ended up in that niche, but I'll take it Okay If that gets me on the show. I'll talk about stats, and I get to talk about it at conferences too, because they love stats, people love stats, it's true.
Alban:You're. So this guy that I went to a concert last night and I'm just talking to somebody who's next to me, who I do not know, and he's talking about his podcast where he interviews musicians and he's telling me all about it. Someone else was like, oh, you should talk to him, he's a podcast guy and he goes. Oh, you work with Tom, he goes. Yeah, I was talking to Tom about what stats are actionable and if, whether or not I'm successful, and he's like Tom had some good ideas and I was like Tom's actually like the guy, like in the world, I like that he uses those words. Yeah, but he said actionable and whether or not my podcast is successful based on my stats. I was like, oh no, that's Tom Like there's nobody else.
Tom:What's so funny is, when I talk about stats, it almost always starts with they're not the most important thing, right, like the thing that I'm about to talk to you about. It's not something you should be looking at every day. It's not something that should be guiding you know the work that you do. It shouldn't be informing how you prioritize your week. You know. All those kinds of things Cause people think about stats and they think about success, and I think it's not what people expect when you start a stats talk with that.
Jordan:Yeah, because I think that's the thing is people put so much weight on their stats. Instead of using it as a tool, they're using it as like a measurement of their success, right? Yes, and so I think it's good to like kind of reframe that mindset around statistics and analytics statistics and analytics.
Tom:It's a deficiency of the industry, because the industry pushes them in that direction right Like in podcasting, there's this narrative that it's all about downloads. There's this narrative that it's all about CPM and how much money you can make based on the number of downloads, and it diminishes the value of podcasting when that's the only way you think about the value of what you're producing.
Alban:So, Tom, could you give us a 30 seconds why you should not listen to the rest of this episode? Why is the rest of this episode not the end? All be all of podcasting.
Jordan:Alban as the head of marketing. This is a terrible question.
Tom:I think the reason that you may consider turning it off right now is you probably didn't get into podcasting for the numbers. You didn't get into it for the stats, you know. You got into it for the stories. You got into it for the, for the people whose lives you could change or affect or make a difference. There was something burning inside of you that got you into podcasting and it probably wasn't the number of downloads, the number of listeners or the number of streams. Right, that's a big one. And as soon as you start looking at those numbers, inevitably you begin to compare them and then you start to feel like oh, wait a minute, why am I even doing this? Well, what are you talking about? You get whatever. 50 people heard the message that you put together Like, isn't that amazing? And they're like well, no, because Joe Rogan gets a gajillion.
Alban:Okay, Don't let that rob you of the joy of what you're doing, Everything else in life. We are okay that other people may have more of that thing and we can still enjoy it. If I was like, oh, I didn't enjoy hanging out with my daughter at the park because other people have more children than me and so they have more kids at the park, You'd be like that's not why you got into parenting.
Jordan:That's such a good analogy. All right, so let's kick things off with the fundamentals of podcast stats. So, if you're new to podcasting, you can think of them as like a food pyramid of stats, right, the ones that are on your Buzzsprout dashboard. This is like the core podcasting stats, and the foundational one is going to be like downloads, streams, listens One of the things that a lot of new podcasters will ask. They'll be like well, what's the difference between a listen and a download? They're sort of the same, but they're sort of not. Tom, can you give us a little bit of insight into, like, how these are a little bit different?
Tom:From the podcast hosting standpoint, the company that hosts your audio file. So if it's Buzzsprout, for example, we know that the audio was downloaded and we know how much of that audio was downloaded, and so once they've downloaded more than 60 seconds, we will call it a download. And so this confuses people because they're like well, what if they were just streaming it? What if they just clicked play, but they didn't actually listen to the whole thing, or they didn't download it to their device. Well, we don't know what they did with it. All we saw was that the data was accessed and that they downloaded a certain number of seconds of your podcast, and so what we do is we'll count it as a download after 60 seconds of data has gone out. Now the internet is so fast, and most of our devices are so fast, that it's very rare that somebody doesn't access at least 60 seconds, because when they click play in their app, it immediately begins to download, and so it's going to download more than a minute pretty quickly. So that's why these numbers get closer and closer, even the number of plays, which some people will call a play, you know, when they press the play button. Well, as soon as they press the play button in their podcast listening app, it's going to go and start downloading the data and then it's going to download more than 60 seconds of it pretty quick, and so that's what we call downloads. And that's where I think the confusion starts, because when you go and you log into your analytics with Apple or you log in and look at your analytics with Spotify, they're going to show you information that we can't tell you. They know things that we don't. They know how many times they literally hit the play button and the pause button right, which is one of the confusing things. I think it's Apple, right, which actually tracks the number of times they press the play button. Even if they're listening to the same episode, the same person, they could click play button, you know 50 times, and it's going to say you had 50 plays, buzz, and so they're like whoa, why are my numbers so different?
Alban:It's just apples and oranges. All right, can I try to spit this back to you? Tom Sure, a download is when somebody requests the file from Buzzsprout.
Tom:So they say I want it.
Alban:And as soon as you've sent over a minute, we say that's a download. Yeah, a listen or a play is like in an app They've clicked it. And mostly it's the apps that are saying that's a listen or a play, because they have a little bit more knowledge, like somebody clicked that button so it didn't just get downloaded to a device and sit there there might actually be like a real human there with ears. Streams technically are the exact same thing as a download, right? Because if somebody's streaming it, then they're asking for the file, so we'll count it as a download.
Tom:Yeah, From the hosting company. There's no difference between a download and a stream.
Alban:Right, which I think is sometimes confusing to people because when we think I didn't download that whole video from Netflix, I streamed it you feel like, oh, that's different than the thing I used to do where I downloaded a whole file to my computer. It's actually not different, Like if I'm streaming a video from Netflix to my Apple TV, I'm just downloading it over time and hopefully downloading faster than it's playing on the TV.
Tom:And the words are being used by different people and so, based on who's using it, what Apple might call a listener, for example, versus what Spotify might call a listener they're not necessarily the same thing. And so, as podcast hosting companies, we've kind of standardized on downloads. In the old days we called them plays, we used to call them plays, and that was a source of confusion. So then we started calling them downloads and so now all the podcast hosting companies kind of agree on that. But when you look at the players, they can all use different terms, and so you kind of got to dig into them each to know what do they mean when they say that?
Alban:It's hard because these are all normal words that have normal connotations. Listening means like active attention, but you know, if you're a listener, you know sometimes you might be talking to somebody and you're like I don't think you're listening to what I'm saying. We want to see that there's attention as well. Even when Spotify says, yeah, you had a listener, you don't know they were really listening. They might have clicked play and hopefully a human was in the room.
Jordan:Yeah. So I have a question for you. If a listener, let's say that like a storytelling podcast, where someone might listen to an episode, two, three, four times, whatever, would that one person count as like four downloads, or will it just count as one?
Tom:From the hosting company. From our standpoint, that's going to count as one download. Okay, from the consumption data that you'll see inside of the player. Whatever player you're using, it knows that you played it four times.
Jordan:Yeah.
Tom:So it knows, but we don't.
Jordan:Gotcha.
Tom:So they can tell you how much engagement and that kind of factors into it. If you have content that's played over and over again, it'll increase your overall engagement because you might have, for example, if they listen to it twice, it's 200% engagement, but from our standpoint it's one download.
Jordan:Okay, that makes sense, and something that you alluded to earlier is that your download numbers, your play numbers, whatever will completely differ from platform to platform, and I think that there's a few reasons for this, one of them being that Buzzsprout is IAB certified and I believe that Spotify and Apple are not. Is that correct?
Tom:It's apples and oranges right, because the IAB certification is really the base minimum. I mean, it's the minimum amount of intelligence that you should be applying to filtering out data to figure out whether or not it was a download or not. But that's because we don't know anything. Yeah, from the host standpoint, all we know is that data was downloaded from an IP address. You know, we know what type of device it was and stuff. But the actual players, like Apple and Spotify, well, they know everything and so the data that they give you. It doesn't really make sense to compare that to IAB certified numbers. Now, there's things that differ between hosts, so this is something that we hear. Somebody switches over to Buzzsprout and they're like oh my gosh, I lost all these listeners because my downloads went down, and we're like well, no, actually it's just the host that you were on before was counting all these downloads that weren't really downloads, and now that you've come over to ours again, ib is a minimum, but we go above and beyond that. We want to provide the most accurate stats in the industry, and so we are actively working to filter out traffic that is not legitimate traffic. It's weird. There's so much just fake traffic out there. Sometimes it's clearly people boosting stats by hiring somebody who says, oh, I'm going to get you these numbers, and then all of a sudden, you'll have, you know, a million downloads from a small village in India, you know, yeah, and so we're constantly in a battle with bots and auTomatic downloading and things like that to try to provide accurate stats to our podcasters, because we want them to have really good information.
Alban:One of the things you've said, Tom, that I always remember is, whenever we get more accurate, the numbers never go up. Yes, they always go down.
Tom:Whenever we get more accurate, nobody gets happy. Nobody's like. This is so great. I thought I had 100, but really I only had 50.
Alban:And those are 50 now real people. When there were 100, a bunch of those might've been bought. Some of those were some AI tool scraping your podcast 10 times a minute and to somebody who just looked at it and went, wow, 100, I've made it to 100. It feels like a big step backwards, but sometimes Tom will see oh, this thing happened. This one went and played 16,000 episodes across Buzzsprout. That's not one guy listening on a huge binge. That was some kind of bot. Those 16,000 plays are not legitimate. And then someone sees it. They're like, oh man, I wish I'd gotten that playback. Well, we can tell, looking at all the data, that that's very unlikely a real play, real download. Excuse me.
Jordan:I think another thing that can affect download numbers across platforms. You know, especially for Spotify and YouTube, when you upload a video, they like to host that video and what they'll do is they will replace the audio file. Especially, Spotify will replace your Buzzsprout audio file in the RSS feed with this video that you've uploaded into the Spotify platform, and what happens is that kind of like cuts the cord between the communication between Spotify and Buzzsprout and so Spotify might be showing all these downloads or all these views or watches or whatever on their platform and then it's not getting translated over to Buzzsprout because you took out the audio of that podcast episode.
Tom:Yeah, so from our standpoint, we never see the file getting downloaded, which is how we count a download right, because what's happening is Spotify is saying oh well, you're using our video service, so we're just going to go ahead and serve up our own version of the audio, we're not going to use your hosting company. And so as soon as somebody does that, like you said, it breaks the connection and those stats become out of whack.
Alban:I actually saw an article now I forget who it was a relatively large media company that was shooting video podcasts started uploading video to Spotify and they claimed that it was costing them money. And it was costing them money because Spotify went okay, now this is a video show, so we no longer pull the audio from your podcast host. Instead, we pull it from our own servers. No harm, no foul. But the problem was that that podcast was putting ads into the file dynamically and they'd swap them out once they were served up. And so when Spotify stopped checking and saying, hey, send us the file every time, and kind of, like you said, broke that cord, well, now they could not sell ads anymore the ads that were in there in that video file. When they uploaded that, those ads got massive amounts of traction. Right, they got their bang for the buck. They got their bang for the buck. That marketer looked like a genius. Everybody else was like well, we didn't get any plays, any downloads, any streams, any likes, any, whatever you want to call them. We didn't get them, so we're not paying. And they're like wow, this was such a bad experience for us because all those files were being cached.
Jordan:Yeah, I saw that one too. That was Amanda McLaughlin from Multitude Productions. They have some of my favorite podcasts in their collective and so that definitely caught my eye and I was really surprised when they said that they lost like $1,000 in the month that they tested that out, doing the video to Spotify.
Tom:Because they didn't realize it would lock in the audio.
Jordan:Yeah, and I mean Spotify obviously said that their Spotify like partner program whatever they're doing is making more money for other people. I don't know. Spotify obviously said that their Spotify like partner program whatever they're doing is making more money for other people. I don't know. So I get it, but it's also just kind of like if you are doing advertising in your podcast, it might do you a little bit better to not opt in for the video.
Alban:At least there's more dynamics there than meet the eye in the beginning, just because there's these different things. It's why all the stats are so hard to pull apart sometimes, especially for a normal podcaster, because some things are going to cash it, some are going to make a video file, some are pulling them differently, some people don't actually listen, some people listen with friends multiple times and all of these different types of edge cases that we're going through lead to you think you know for sure why one number looks different. But there's not just like one reason why they may look slightly different. There's so many that a really big podcast collective can put their video up on Spotify and go. We know what's going to happen way more reach. And then they go oh, we lost a thousand bucks because of the way this technically works slightly differently. It cost us money.
Tom:If you go back to where we started in terms of healthy relationship with your stats, not obsessing over them, remembering why you got into podcasting, all those kinds of things. This is typically what happens when somebody writes in and they've got a really complicated statistics question and so support will maybe throw it over to me to do some investigation. It's very rare that I get into that Cause. I remember that, like all the things that Alban just went through, you're comparing this number to this number and you're, you know, doing all the math and you're getting out your abacus and whiteboard and you're trying to figure these things out. And then I go and I log into their account and they have like 30 downloads, yeah, yeah, and I'm like, okay, you're trying to figure out why one said 22 and one said 30, but, man, the best use of your time is not that Focusing on your content, focusing on why you enjoy podcasting, what got you into podcasting, and not obsessing over trying to figure out the differences between these different numbers. And just take it all with a grain of salt. Yeah, it's about 30, you know, but I think that's so important.
Jordan:I've seen some people spiral down that rabbit hole in our community group, especially new podcasters. You know they'll just be like. I have one download across all my episodes, what's happening, what's going on, and we're just like dude. Someone probably just like subscribe to your podcast.
Alban:We all do it when we start something new. When you open your first bank account, you're like, oh, I have $12 in there. Now I have $13 in there and you're like slowly adding your allowance to it. You're excited. And when I started a blog I was like, oh, I got a reader today. That's awesome. And in the beginning we all are like checking it. You know it'd be much more stressful if, like, the bank told you, hey, you know, some of these dollars are real dollars and we're Canadian dollars Some we want to tell you they're kind of like a dollar, but they're not really dollars.
Tom:Why are these numbers different? Well, it's really complicated.
Alban:And let me tell you the bad news is, whenever it gets more accurate, it does go down.
Jordan:Now we're just into the crypto market.
Tom:But you figure, you know we're coming at it from a place that we care about podcasters. We want them to be able to keep podcasting, and we know that there are certain things that you know take away that motivation, and numbers can only provide so much motivation, and so you're trying to figure out how much to play. I mean, it was something we talked about with the mobile app, right, because when you log in with our mobile app which is amazing, it's great the first thing you see, though, are your downloads today, and we debated that right. Like how valuable is that? It's a little bit of a brain hit of like ooh, I got you know six downloads today, or 10 downloads today, but at the same time, we're putting downloads in front of them, making them think it's the most important thing, or make them think that you need to launch your app every day to look at your numbers, and so it's a delicate balance for us to strike in Buzzsprout, because we want to give podcasters what they want, but we also want to give them what they need, which sometimes is less statistics. It's like we should have a little thing where you can only check your numbers so often. You know, we used to remember we used to cash them for six hours, so you could, your numbers would not change for six hours and people would complain.
Jordan:They're like I want it to change all the time. We're like once every six hours, that's it All right. So let's go into what I think is the most fun stat for podcasters. It's the geographic data, the locations. Where are your listeners at most platforms that you go into are going to give you location data. So it's going to be like countries, states, cities, all that stuff. In our app we have a really cool little section. That is honestly one of my favorite things and it's like newest five cities that your podcast has been downloaded in. That is just so much fun. So it's a really quick way to see what new locations your podcast has been kind of like globetrotting to.
Tom:Yeah, that was a fun little thing to add, to try and put something that gives a little bit of encouragement, a little boost to be able to see where people are listening. And all of that is based on where those downloads occurred. I remember one time somebody wrote in and said something like I didn't get any downloads from this city in England. And I know I got a download from this city in England and I wrote back and I was like, well, you know, you got other downloads in the area, you know, and so it's possible that no, no, no, it was definitely this city, because my mom told me she downloaded the podcast. And I was like oh dude, your mom lied. That hurts, but what happens is we use the IP address that is used by the device that downloads the episode, and that IP address is registered with whoever issued that IP address. So, for example, let's say you were listening on your phone and you have AT&T. It's going to be an IP address that was issued by AT&T and where they registered. What geographic information they provide is totally up to the internet provider, and so it's not always accurate, and that's why it can be off sometimes where this poor guy in England, his mom, might have actually downloaded it, but the IP address might've been associated with a city one county over or whatever they are in England.
Alban:Same issue we get with like zip codes, or you might get with an area code for a phone. Someone may be in Jacksonville, florida, but when they call you they don't have a 904 area code because they used to live somewhere else and that's where they got the phone. Or they're from just outside, or the area code. They added another number and you didn't know about it.
Tom:There's any number of reasons why the area code doesn't 100% line up with the exact cities, so the IP address is what everyone uses really to determine location, and we also have more and more what would you call them like Anonymizers. There you go. Yeah, it could be a VPN. It could be other sources of basically hiding people's IP addresses, which is a common practice where people don't want people to track them and they use ad blockers and things like that that might change their IP address. Well, because of that, it can totally throw off the location data. So they have no, we have no idea where they're coming from. So sometimes people will say well, I got all these downloads from unknown. What does that mean? Well, it's unknown. We literally just don't know the location. It was just an IP address. It's not associated with any geographic area.
Jordan:There was like an earlier episode of Buzzcast where you guys had this whole like mystery about like Lake Stevens Washington. Yeah, I think it was like a two episode arc in Buzzcast.
Tom:And didn't somebody? Somebody actually went to Lake Stevens and they posted yeah.
Jordan:And it was like some sort of like data farm or something like that. I don't know what it was, but yeah.
Tom:Yeah, and so some. Sometimes. That that'll happen too is you'll see a lot from like the I think it's Richmond, virginia or somewhere in Virginia that is a data center for Amazon, and so you'll have downloads from that location, and some of them are legit. We've tried trust me, albin knows I'll go block traffic, but then you'll find out that it's actually legitimate. They, when they reach out and they're like wait, wait a minute, there's an issue. And what's happening is there's like VPN services where they're terminated at a regional data center in, let's say, virginia, but they might actually be accessing it from anywhere in the world, and so all of those downloads will show up in that one area.
Alban:One of my favorite stories about location data was Jordan Harbinger had his podcast and he started seeing one consistent download in Tanzania and he was like he had one I mean it was early on so he didn't have tons of listeners and he's like it keeps showing up. It's like Tanzania, Tanzania. And eventually he was like hey, you know, thanks everyone who's listening, but there's, I think, one of you who's located in Tanzania. If that's you like, reach out. Here's my email, Tell me if that's true. And a guy reached out and said yeah, I'm in Tanzania, I download your episode, I burn them onto CDs and then I listened to your podcast when I'm out in like the Serengeti national park, like on safari, Wow, Like when you hear like oh, I got downloaded in Tanzania, it just feels like, okay, maybe probably that'd be cool. But when you connect with the person and then they tell you the story of like, oh, no, I'm listening to your podcast, it's important enough, it's downloaded to a CD. Here's what I'm listening. You're like oh, the story is so much more fun than just like that stat counting a little bit higher and higher.
Tom:Yeah, and all of a sudden that one becomes way more significant, right? That little one on Tanzania at the botTom of your location data? Well, now there's a name associated with it. There's a person, a relationship. It just changes things. And the reality is, every one of your stats is associated with a listener. You know somebody that downloaded it, no matter where it came from, and if you can connect with that, it makes it way more motivating.
Jordan:When you do look at those numbers, Alban, I think that story actually nicely segues into our next set of stats, which is device and app data. I don't think CD is going to be on this list, but in Buzzsprout you can see which apps your listeners use whether it's Spotify, apple Podcasts, overcast, anything like that and then you can also see what devices people use. I think that these are stats that people don't really know what to do with it or why it's there.
Tom:Well, it's just overwhelmingly mobile. Yeah, and I think that's what podcasters need to be aware of is that the majority of the downloads that are happening are on mobile devices, especially in light of all the conversations we've been having about video, and I know there's been some heated exchanges with people that are adamant about video. But it's recognizing it's on mobile devices and so that's somewhat limiting. When you look at the amount of listens that happen, for example, in smart TVs, it's just not even significant. It's almost all mobile devices. It's mostly iPhone if you're in the West right, because that's where most of the downloads happen is in the US, the UK, and those are predominantly Apple devices, and so a lot of iOS, even though some other people may be in other areas. I know that, albin, we had somebody in our Facebook creators group who was in Central America somewhere and almost all of her downloads were Android Spotify, because all of her downloads were coming from Central America, and so you can see some information about it. But the only takeaway that I really have is it's predominantly mobile. No matter where you are in the world, it's going to be mobile, and I know that there was some data the podcast landscape statistics from 2024, where they were talking about, you know, listeners being on the move, and it was something like 66% of podcast listeners said they like to listen while they're driving or traveling. That tells you something about the mindshare that we have with podcasting is that they're doing something else and they're listening to this at the same time on a mobile device. And again, it informs how you should approach video, recognizing that 66% are going to listen while they're driving, 61% are listening while they're walking or they're exercising, and it bears out in the stats because we see predominantly those downloads are happening on mobile devices, which would be conducive to doing something else. Doing household chores is another big statistic for people listening to podcasts. All that happens on a mobile device. Web players is one of the other you know big download sources that we see are people that are actually downloading it on the web. And I think it's worth talking a little bit about that, because the web player is questionable in my mind, because how often do you listen to a podcast on your browser? I mean, I do it occasionally, but the majority of the time I might listen on the browser and go, oh, I want to listen to that. And then what do I do? I pop out my phone and I queue it up to listen to the next time I'm listening to a podcast. Yeah, and so I'm always a little suspicious of web player downloads, and it might just be that I I have just had so many experiences where people had their players. They didn't use the Buzzsprout player, they use their own player, and every time somebody was going to the webpage, it was downloading the episode and they didn't realize it. And so what happens is you're like, oh my gosh, I'm blowing up. Well, yeah, you're blowing up with web player downloads because you're not using a player that's correctly handling your data. And so what's happening is, when they go to the page, as soon as they go to the page, it's downloading the MP3. And so the web player downloads, I think, are something that people should be cautious about thinking, oh, everyone's listening on my website and they're not listening on a mobile device. Statistically, that would be an anomaly, and I doubt it.
Jordan:I think that there's some services where if you get your podcast listed or you you pay for like podcast advertising, where they put it like on a webpage. Sometimes I'll put it like on an autoplayer so that whenever someone like goes to this webpage and your podcast is like at the top or at the botTom or whatever, it'll auTomatically start playing it like in the background.
Tom:Yes, and that'll count as a web player.
Jordan:Yeah, Like a legitimate one, cause someone's accessing it, right, but it's just they're just being forced to. Yes, exactly yeah.
Tom:They didn't choose to.
Jordan:Yeah, so I've always been a little leery of those.
Tom:Do you remember in the old days people used to do that? You'd go to a webpage and it would start playing like out your speakers until the world basically revolted and they were like we never, ever want you to start playing audio when we go to a webpage.
Alban:And then podcast numbers started going down really quickly. One person I have seen who web players legitimately were a majority of their plays was somebody who does a podcast about the villages, which is a massive retirement community in central Florida, and so almost all of his listeners were retirees in like their 70s and 80s and for all of them they had a desktop computer and so they would pull up the podcast on the website and play it and listen to the whole thing. So that one that made sense to me.
Tom:And I would think too, I've definitely seen sites where they create an experience on their website that involves the podcast. So, in other words, I'm playing. I'm playing the podcast, but it's also doing stuff inside of a transcript and maybe it's got you know, other information about the podcast, like pictures and links related to it, and you can click on those things and it won't stop the player. So they've actually built out an experience in the browser. Well, yeah, for those people those are probably legit web downloads, but for the majority of podcasters they're just using an embedded player. I feel like it's more for discovery than actual listening experience.
Alban:Yeah, so as we kind of start talking about the demographic data, could we talk some about how demographics are shown inside of all these other apps? Because we've talked a little bit about how, buzzsprout, we can't show you age. You know age, gender, things like that. But some of those do show up in podcast listening apps.
Jordan:Yeah, the three primary apps where you can get this information are going to be Spotify for creators, apple Podcasts and YouTube Studio, if you submitted your RSS feed to YouTube.
Tom:And these are definitely things worth looking at. Right, If you're interested in statistics, you should be looking at the information that you can get from Spotify and Apple, specifically If you're doing stuff on YouTube YouTube as well but these numbers are really informative and there are things that you cannot get from your podcast host.
Jordan:What's kind of cool is that all of these different apps provide different insights into your podcast and into the people who are listening to your podcast. So if you kind of like Frankenstein, all these stats together, you can get a really comprehensive look at how your podcast is growing, how you should market it, what your audience looks like, things like that. So one of the things that Buzzsprout has that you won't see in like Spotify or YouTube, is the episode pacing chart and it tracks your like last four episodes performance over 30 days, and so you can just see this line graph and see how they're comparing to each other.
Tom:The episode pacing chart, I think, is a great application of statistics that Kevin really pushed for. You know we went back and forth with different ideas of how we could accomplish it, but what's nice about it is it's comparing your episodes to one another, so you're not comparing yourself to other podcasters, you're comparing yourself to yourself. If you're growing your audience, you should see your episode pacing is getting better. Let's say that the last episode you got to 30 downloads in the first seven days. Well, the new one, maybe you got to 30 downloads after just three days. Right, so you can see the pacing is getting better. You're getting a bigger audience to download your episodes quicker.
Jordan:Yeah, Sometimes we'll kind of experiment with how we name episodes, Like maybe a certain episode will be titled something a little bit catchier, Maybe another one will be. I don't know more straightforward about what the episode's about. If you kind of experiment with that, you can see on the episode pacing chart which one's going gonna get the most attraction in the first month of it being published.
Alban:Yeah, and it helps you compare your marketing I mean any marketing that you're doing around the episode. Sometimes it's difficult if, like, my last episode got a thousand plays and I'm like okay, cool, and the new episode's only at 400 plays, that sounds bad. But new episodes only at 400 plays, that sounds bad. But then if you consider the new episode is only two days old and the last episode is, at this point, two weeks old, the pacing chart helps you compare two day old to two day old episode and then five day old episode to five day old episode and then you can see when one of those is outpacing the other. You're like you can go oh, there's a difference here. I started getting more plays for the new episode, even though the total number is pretty low right now. It's on pace to be my biggest episode ever.
Tom:Then you're trying to figure out why is it on a different pace? So what Jordan was saying, like it may be because you took a different approach with the way that you did your titles or your artwork. It could be a difference in the way that you do your marketing and the way that you send out your email or posting on social media. But the statistics is just showing you that the new episode is on a higher pace or faster pace than the previous one, and then it's up to you to figure out. Okay, what's working or not working?
Jordan:And let's say that you have guests on every other episode and then you start noticing that the episodes where you're just like flying solo are always pacing a little bit less than the ones where you have a guest. Well, maybe that's a good indication that you should have guests on more often, because guests are promoting the podcast and so it's reaching more people.
Tom:Yeah, and you know we're going to talk about the other platforms as well, and what the other platforms offer that you can't get from your podcast host is engagement. Yes, and exactly what you were just describing. I just was thinking about a podcast that I listened to and I don't know if I feel a little bit guilty, but when I listened to it, if the main podcast host isn't the host on that episode, I don't listen to it.
Alban:Oh, I have plenty where I do the same, where I'm like I love them, but I'm bouncing.
Tom:I'm bouncing right, so they get the download, but if they look at their engagement, they'll see that the engagement on that episode was less because people only listened for the first 60 seconds. They realized, oh, the main host isn't on the show and so they bounced, whereas the other ones get full engagement. They listened for 45 minutes because it was the main host, and that's great actionable information that you can get, but you can only get it from the players from Apple from. Spotify from YouTube, so we'll have to watch this episode and see if Kevin's going to stick around or swap you out. Well, at the very beginning, when we said, oh, you don't want to listen to this episode if you don't want to look at stats, Okay.
Jordan:So one of the things I really want to talk about with Spotify's individual stats is the impressions. This is something that has been added recently and it's how many times your show was seen in search results or recommendations. And what's kind of cool about this is sometimes you'll publish something and the algorithm will pick it up and then you'll see that the impressions are up really high, and one of the things that I like to look at is the conversion rate from impressions to like actual plays. I have some episodes in my storytelling podcast where it maybe is a lesser known story. My podcast gets served to a lot of people in the algorithm, but they don't actually press play, and so I think, okay, I need to start like really sticking to stories that people know so that when they do see it, they'll be like I love Winnie the Pooh, you know.
Tom:Yeah, that impression number is really significant for understanding, like your artwork, your title, whether it's working with your audience, because you'll see the difference right, people saw the impression and then they actually clicked. And if you see those numbers and the conversion rate is really low, you want to figure out what is it that they saw that they didn't want to click. Why is it that they didn't actually, you know, click the button to play, whether it's because they didn't recognize the story or because the artwork wasn't compelling. It's trying to figure that out. So I think it's really good data for people to look at.
Jordan:Yeah, and another thing that Spotify offers and actually YouTube has this as well is the age, gender, location, device type, things like that. But age and gender is really gonna tell you a lot about who your podcast audience is, and so if that's something you're interested in, especially if you're trying to get a sponsor, they love to know what age group your listeners are in. They love to know, you know, are they male, female, anything like that, and so that's really valuable information. If you're trying to get an advertiser or trying to get someone to sponsor your podcast, you can pull that information from Spotify, you can pull it from YouTube. If you're using YouTube, just put it into like a nice little PDF document and shoot it off to them.
Tom:It just has to be qualified with the idea that it's only from those platforms. So, for example, spotify skews younger, apple Podcasts skews older, and so if you're looking at age and gender information, really it's only telling you for the platform that you're looking at, and so, depending on how many downloads you're getting on those other platforms, it may not be the best representation that's why I always recommend that people do a podcast listener survey.
Jordan:You can just use google form.
Tom:So great, it's free. It's free and we know that listeners want to engage with their podcaster, and so what a great way. I'll have people that are like well, how am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to know? You know what their age and gender is. Ask them put up a form, rather than trying to deduce it through some creepy. You know statistic? Why don't you just ask them to fill out a little survey and you're going to give them a shout out on the show, or I don't know? Do something.
Jordan:Well, I have them give me like offer up topic ideas for future episodes and that seems to really do it. One year I tried offering up a $25 Amazon gift card because you can just email it to people. This is fully digital, so if they just leave their email you can do like a drawing thing. Honestly, I did not have more engagement with the survey from running the $25 gift card, so but I will say that when I did run a survey it was pretty close to what I saw on Spotify Not exactly, but it was pretty darn close.
Tom:Yeah, are the majority of your downloads on Spotify.
Jordan:Yes, Vast majority. I would say like I think it was like 70% of my downloads were on Spotify.
Alban:This show. A majority of ours are over on Apple podcasts. So I think some of these other stats if we talk about Apple for a second or once that we're a little bit more familiar with, or at least I am. I think one of the best measures of success is retention. How long do people stick with the episode when they start it? And you can look at this graph that starts out close to 100% 100% of people who click play at the beginning and you see it pretty quickly drop off. Sometimes some people might listen to five seconds, but you might have episodes where a majority of people are still listening in the final minute of the episode. It's really helpful because you see what moments do people cut off. You know, is it when we start doing a fan mail later in the episode? Is it when I start ranting about video podcasting? Is it during a long segment on whatever it is? You realize, oh, there's certain aspects of the show that everyone's engaging with and then there's other aspects that are pretty boring and it kind of gives you a bit of a hint of which pieces are working and which you might want to skip in the future.
Jordan:Oh yeah, I have like clockwork about one minute into my podcast I have a 60 second ad read. And if you look at Spotify, the retention graph, if you look at Apple podcasts the retention graph, there's a perfect little divot in every single episode about a minute in where people skip and they come right back Like they're they're sticking around, but there's that little divot right there and so you know, if I were diabolical I might switch it up on them and, you know, put it like two minutes in instead of one minute. But there was one podcaster that I had heard from that they were having people just completely drop off about like 10 minutes before the episode finished and they were like why does this keep happening? And they went back and listened and every single episode towards like the last 10 minutes they're like all right, guys, well, you know we're wrapping up, and then they'd continue talking or they do like the call to actions or things like that. And so they realize like, oh, I need to quit saying all right before we wrap up or okay before we end things. And I think that that was a really good takeaway from episode consumption or audience retention.
Alban:Yeah, we've seen this a lot with YouTube, especially when we're making YouTube videos that the minute you say thank you for watching, then people immediately click off of the video because that signals to them oh, this is over, even if you say thank you for watching, here's another resource, here's something valuable, here's another tip and there's more after that. It's like I don't know Manchurian candidate, the minute that you set off like that secret phrase in their brain thanks for watching. They're like I'm out of here. And they click off as quickly as they can. One thing over on YouTube that's unique, that I really enjoy for video content. So if you're making podcasts with a video element, or maybe you've put your podcast just as an audio podcast over on YouTube, one thing you'll get is traffic sources. And sources will tell you where that traffic came from. It's not always, in web analytics, the most accurate, but it will kind of tell you like this came from another website. You kind of go okay, somebody recommended it, or it came from YouTube search, which means people were searching for this. They'll sometimes tell you the exact search terms people were using. It came from YouTube recommended, which is like it's either on that sidebar or it's on that big homepage with videos. They start telling you where things come from and, based on where those traffic sources come from, you learn a little bit more about what type of content you're creating. So if something shows up in YouTube search all the time, you're kind of more how to content. You know how to fix a dishwasher, how to fix this thing, how to make something, but where? If it's recommended, you're probably less how to and you're more likely entertainment and people are just like they see it and they're like, oh, this will be fun, I'll just click this on and watch. You know my favorite golfer do something silly.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:That's a valuable thing If you're on YouTube, especially if you're creating video content. That traffic sources is something I would go look at.
Jordan:All right. So we covered all the stats that I think we really can cover in podcasting. There's one thing that we didn't cover and I kind of want to reframe this. I see this question a lot is how do I study my competitors' podcast analytics? And the way. I want to reframe this, because in podcasting I don't feel like there's competitors, there's just community. So I want to say how do I study other podcasts in my community? Like, how do I study my equals podcast analytics and see how I'm measuring up against them?
Alban:I know a lot of us recommend the OP3 tag open podcasting analytics tag. Sometimes podcasters make that public, but I often will check podcasts with listen notes. So, I go to listen notes and I will search for the podcast and it will kind of tell you like this podcast probably in the top 50% or the top 1% or the top 0.001%. And it gives you an idea of about how big it is. You can go look at something like CastBox, which actually shares how many subscribers are on CastBox for that show. So you can kind of look at and then, based on you know cast boxes, 2% of the industry you can multiply by 50 and you've got like a ballpark of the plays they're getting.
Tom:And there's always reaching out to the podcast, right.
Alban:Oh yeah that's true.
Tom:Podcasters are pretty friendly and insecure, and so they kind of want to know well, if you share your numbers with me, I'll share my numbers with you, you know. Yeah, so there can be an opportunity, especially when you're in the same community. You're trying to make a difference and help both podcasts grow.
Alban:Yeah, I think there can be a little bit of people inflate their numbers a bit. I think when you're on YouTube, it's pretty clear how many subscribers and plays your videos get, and so people are a little bit more honest because everyone can see it. But since podcasting is hidden, which is probably healthier, the unhealthy piece is that people will say, oh yeah, I'm getting about a thousand plays per episode, but maybe they hit thousand sometimes, but on average they're mostly getting like 500. You just remember, when people are sharing it with you, especially if they're trying to portray themselves as the guru, they might be inflating those numbers a little bit.
Tom:So one of the things that I'm always thinking through as I'm looking at statistics is how can I make it actionable, how can I provide a podcaster with information that they can actually do something about? But the reality is the podcaster can only do so much. The podcaster can only do so much, and so, from your perspective, what are the things that you can do that stats might inform decisions that you're?
Alban:making Well. Number one is go into Apple Podcasts. Look at that playthrough data. Identify drop-off points, especially for shows that are segmented. Like this show is we have an intro but then we have main body and then we have sound off. Then we have, like this post show. If we go in there and all of a sudden the post show is just a massive drop off, you could just delete that part of the podcast. You know. Find the weak areas, cut those out. That's one of the most actionable things you can do.
Jordan:I think another one that comes to mind specifically because we kind of went through it with Buzzcast, is to make sure that your podcast titles are optimized. We went through a period of having these cheeky, kind of catchy, funny, punny episode titles, which were great and they were so cool, and then the download numbers were kind of dropping and so we realized like, okay, we have to make sure that we're hitting actual keywords that independent podcasters are going to be typing into the Apple podcast search engines, and so I had to go back and retitle those and the performance was much better than having these funny titles I thought were great.
Tom:So maybe you see that in terms of pacing, because you change your titles and descriptions and then you got a faster pace on your downloads. Or maybe you got better click-through conversions from impressions in your Spotify statistics. Those numbers would help you optimize those titles and descriptions. That's a good one.
Alban:I would just go look at what are your top 10 episodes, or what's the top 10% of your episodes, you know, if you have 100, go look at the top 10. How are those different? Different titles, different format, different length, different topics, different guests, different host. What's different there? I recently read a really great review of a blog and the guy said yeah, I actually regularly get three, four times as many reads if I double the amount of time I work on the blog. He was like, for some reason, the ones that I work harder on they just come out in a different way and I get so many more reads so I'm just doubling down on how long I spend on each post. Not intuitive to me that that would be the case, but when he looked at the top 10%, the top 10% were all ones he'd put way more time into.
Tom:So, looking at those popular episodes, just looking at which ones, maybe over a period of time, the same period of time, so you're comparing apples to apples, which ones are the most popular and then look for patterns on those.
Jordan:Yeah. Another one is definitely, if you're trying to get like sponsors or brand deals, definitely look at YouTube, spotify to find that gender, geographic data, age, things like that. Because you're going to want to make sure that when you do find a sponsor, when you do work with a brand, that you are finding one that is going to resonate with your audience. You don't want to betray your audience's trust by like okay, so for like my bedtime story podcast, I'm probably not going to do like me undies, cause that might be like a little weird.
Alban:It's very weird.
Jordan:Yeah, that'd be weird right, but a brand that I would work with, especially since my audience leans predominantly 30 to 50 year old women. I might do a women's like pajama company or something like that, because that's going to resonate more with them and actually it's going to make that sponsor come back because it's probably going to get more action.
Alban:And with all of these insights, I think the key piece is it's a guess. You read your stats, you try to do something, you go okay, here's my guess, here's my hypothesis. Go through the scientific method and come up with an experiment and then let's try to improve and you might find this experiment has incredible results. You might find this experiment doesn't seem to have any effect. Both of those are good things to learn, because you're trying to find which are the levers that, when you pull them, things are happening that are really good for your podcast and which ones are just a total waste of time. Because if you can figure out which things are a waste of time, then you never have to do that work ever again and you get to free yourself from it. So experimentation is really a wonderful thing in saving yourself time and streamlining your process.
Jordan:Thanks, Tom, for joining us on that discussion about stats. I am really glad that we were able to take that time. I know we went really deep into the topic and hopefully it was interesting. I think it will be. But if we did not cover a question that you have on stats, you can always post a question in the Facebook community group, in the Reddit community, and we'll be sure to answer that. So make sure you're engaging there. Let's get into sound off. So our first message is from Megan Assa, the lives I've lived podcast. Megan says Hello, I started podcasting July 2024. And buzzbrow has been such an incredible tool, so glad to hear that I gave myself the goal of being consistent for one year to see if I like the form of content creation. I love it and I'm already committing to a second year. What keeps me motivated is genuine connections I get to experience as I interview each guest and I've also gotten feedback that going down memory lane with my guests has allowed them to really celebrate beautiful moments they haven't thought about in a long time. I love that. Megan, Thank you so much for writing in.
Alban:Somebody in Kalamazoo, Michigan, reached out and they said what was the marketing podcast that Alban mentioned? This was the Ahrefs Marketing Show. Ahrefs is a little bit hard to spell. It's the HTML tag, so it's A-H-R-E-F-S Ahrefs Marketing Show. It's also on YouTube as a video podcast. So great in both formats.
Tom:This is Ken from Discount Storytime he writes in. Sometimes the universe lines up. When you talked about listener feedback, I felt discouraged because I had not received any fan mail. No sooner had I finished listening than I got my first fan mail message telling me how much they enjoyed the story that I told. I have a question for you all about sharing listeners' comments. What if a commenter leaves a name? Do you leave that out or somehow get their permission beforehand? I want to be respectful of my audience's privacy. It's funny because we just told Ken's name.
Jordan:Ken did explain in another message that it was okay if we used his name. So thank you, ken, yeah.
Alban:I think most people can use a little bit of discernment. If someone's sharing a really private thing and the only way you know their name is because it was in a previous message, like you can leave the name out.
Tom:I think this is a great thing that he's saying about the universe lining up and getting that fan mail. Because I talk to people and they're like discouraged by fan mail because they turn it on and they don't get any fan mail. And I always ask, like, what have you done to get people to send you a fan mail? Like, have you asked a question? Have you encouraged them to be able to do it? Because when you get that first one, when you get that first fan mail, it feels so good to know that there's one person that's listening, that's willing to click it and send you a message.
Jordan:All right, and so we actually have some messages. Alban, you've been sort of like the center of topic discussion a bit here I'm going to start with a message that I actually received during this recording. Okay, and this is from Tina at the Cancer Pod. She says this is for Alban. I listened to the last Buzzcast episode, the man Needs Air. Alban, about the room you record in, some plants would love that CO2 you are making and they'll give you the O2 you need. Get some plants. So if you didn't listen to, I think, a pre-show that we had a couple episodes ago, alvin got a carbon dioxide.
Alban:Just a CO2, carbon dioxide.
Jordan:Yeah, okay.
Alban:Which right now is well into the cognitive impairment zone. So if this podcast has gotten, it'd been degrading. I blame it on the CO2.
Jordan:She also sent in some links for more plant stuff, so I'll make sure that I forward that to you, alvin.
Alban:I have some fake plants in here. They do not provide the CO2 relief.
Jordan:Yeah, no, you got to get the real stuff in there.
Tom:We had a listener in Chicago write in and I'm going to try and read it as best I can in his voice Dude Alban, very impressed with your running. Great work, bro. I've been doing CrossFit for 16 years, currently 51 years old, but running has always been a weak point for me. Hearing about that massive long run in Georgia and now the 15K where you were pushing the limit the whole way Very impressive. Great job man.
Alban:I didn't realize. You just do a CrossFit bro voice. I wanted to do a CrossFit bro.
Jordan:He's probably like the nicest guy ever too.
Alban:Listener in Chicago. I don't know if you know Podcast Movement Evolutions at the end of the month is in Chicago.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:You know it's a smaller version of Podcast Movement, but if you're free it's during the week it's a good conference. I'll be there If you come. We can go for a run, we go do a CrossFit workout, you can get on the running journey.
Jordan:All right and we've got another response to the 15K story. D Sparkling Life Coach said love the quick cast post show. Congrats, alvin, on completing the 15K. I think your friend in the suit is great.
Alban:That's true. That's my friend who ran the whole thing wearing a suit and tie.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:So Kevin had a pitch for everybody which was talking about sometimes doing things so you can talk about them on your podcast and his challenge to everybody. What he asked everyone to do was write in with a challenge for us and so we can do some of your challenges and try to report back. The first one targets Kevin specifically. Steven Robles from Riversidefm wrote and said I challenged Kevin to make a video. It can be short and post it with the same rant against video podcasting that he did on the show. Steven, excellent marketing move there. You know he may be using Riverside FM to do that video rant, so Kevin's out this week but maybe when he comes back he'll consider it.
Jordan:All right, lamar's, iowa, listening to you talking about doing things. Just talk about it on the podcast First of all. In general, it could be a fun way to try something new. They say for our podcast we share research-based tools, techniques and quite frankly, I haven't done all the things we share, so sometimes I will try them to share about my experience, for example, giving kids choices, mindfulness, et cetera.
Tom:D from Sparkling Life Coach. Of course, my challenge has to do with health. I challenge you to a seven-day sugar-free detox where you ditch added sugars and processed sweeteners from your diet, and if you decide to take this challenge, I'll do it with you too. Okay, so I know I'm not part of the challenge, but I just wanted to get a little humble brag in here that I did give up sugar for 20 days.
Jordan:Wow.
Tom:Absolutely no added sugar, nothing. What were the results? I lost like 15 pounds.
Jordan:Are you serious?
Tom:Yeah, no 20 days. How much added sugar were you eating, Tom? Okay, I got to be honest. Like that's the only when you talk about, like, giving up carbs, the only carbs that are hard for me to give up are the straight sugars, okay, so yeah, Tom's eating pure sugar cubes. Yes, right, ice cream and wedding cake. I mean, come on, that's, that's what we're talking about. But anyways, I don't know if you guys want to do that for a seven day challenge, but you know what?
Jordan:I'm actually not going to opt for this just because, in honor of St Patrick's day, I'm doing like a dry March, so I've already cut out wine and beer. I'm don't think I'm going to like rid myself of all joy in the world.
Tom:You know what? For 20 days, that's what I felt like every day I'd just wake up and I'd be like why do I even get out of bed? I can't have any sugar today, Like this is just crazy.
Alban:The next one we had was Marty from Nepal, and he said I love listening to the three of you banter. Hearing Alban's run story sparked an idea for a challenge Record an episode outside of the studio space you usually use, though not inside of a car.
Jordan:Yeah, thank you, marty.
Alban:While you run. So what I've got in my hand and I'm showing Tom and Jordan on the video right now is I bought a mobile audio recorder and I added a strap to it so that it kind of like I can hold it in my hand and I use it when I run. So I've been running without listening to music and mostly I'm just thinking, you know, a lot of times trying to work through a work problem in my mind, and I took this audio recorder so I can record little snippets and then I go back and I type up what I wrote earlier. So it's not really good podcast audio, but yeah, I've kind of been leaning into this a bit more. I love kind of taking these one use devices so that I'm not distracted by other things.
Jordan:That sounds like a spinoff podcast that we could have, like Alban's running thoughts.
Alban:I mean it's the recorder is shockingly good. The audio quality is pretty bad because you know there's wind and I'm breathing. I'm like make sure I tell Jordan about, like, does it sound great?
Jordan:And then we also have a submission from manhood matters podcast saying here's something that you guys can do for the sake of discussing it on the show. Listen to one of my episodes and give me an honest and brutal review. I know you're too kind to be brutal, so maybe don't worry about the content, but more technical things I can improve on. Okay, so my husband recently did this with chat GBT. He fed a transcript of all this podcast episodes into it and said give me a brutal review. Don't do that, because chat GBT will take it as an opportunity to just roast you. It's really bad. I'm tempted to do it for Buzzcast. We might make that a segment. I'm not sure, but I did listen to a few episodes, marty, and I think that your podcast is really great. Obviously, your Buzzsprout website is completely stacked. You have all the features turned on. I love it. One thing I did notice about your podcast is that you don't have a call to action anywhere in your podcast. You have all your social media links. You have your support the show using Buzzsprout subscriptions and you have fan mail enabled, and I didn't see a call to action in your episodes. You got to put a call to action in there to get more listener engagement.
Tom:It's a good one, steph from Geopats. Her challenge is to wear goofy clothing during a recording to see if it changes your mood or vocal sound at all, and talk about it at the end of the episode.
Alban:Joke's on you, steph Tom, and I have been wearing goofy clothes every episode that we've ever done.
Jordan:That's why we don't do video podcasts. That's the real reason.
Alban:Michelle from Rise and Rain. My challenge for all three of you is to swap hosting styles For one episode. Kevin tries to sound like Jordan or Alban Alban tries to sound like Jordan, or Alban Alban tries to sound like Jordan or Kevin. This would be a great post-show at some point. So we divvy them up. I like this idea. This is ridiculous. And she says whoever does Jordan has to try to imitate her laugh. This is mandatory.
Jordan:Totally agree. Oh gosh, kevin Lowe, with grit, grace and inspiration, says as a guy who has been completely blind for 21 years, I find it hysterical how amazed people are that I can eat without making a mess. So my challenge is to sit down for dinner with lights turned off, a blindfold on and have someone else set your dinner in front of you. Now attempt to cut up your food, find your drink, butter, your roll, all the normal dinner stuff. From experience attending fundraisers called Dining in the Dark, it's more difficult than most imagine. This is a really good challenge and I think it's something that, honestly, everyone should do at some point.
Alban:There was an exhibit years ago that my wife and I went to called Conversation in the Dark or something. It's like you go into a museum and they take you into a room and it gets darker and darker until you're in a room that is complete pitch black and then somebody who's blind comes into the room and they says, like okay, we're about to go through this whole exhibit together, so just keep listening to the sound of my voice. You're going to experience what it's like to be blind and you go through a grocery store, you try to cross the street and they're just trying to give you a little bit of an experience and in the end of it you ate food and had a drink and stuff, and it was such a interesting experience. One of the things I noticed was how much your senses are heightened by the end of it. You know, when you can't see, you start noticing smells so much more strongly and your sense of direction and space changes. So that was like a couple hours. So yeah, kevin, I love this idea. I think, kevin, I need to try it out.
Jordan:All right. So do we have a sound off question for the next episode? Do we have any ideas for that?
Alban:Yeah, Jordan, you kept bringing us back to listener surveys. You're saying why don't you listen? Why don't you ask people? Why don't you ask people? So let's do it. We've got all of our stats, all of our download data. We think we know where you live based on that download data. But tell us like, where are you? Where did you download this episode? If you want to tell us a little bit about you, Something that we wouldn't be able to tell another way, right.
Tom:Like something that we could. Statistics could never tell us. Something about yourself that statistics could have never told us.
Jordan:Do you burn our podcast on a CD and listen to it on Safari?
Alban:And I'm thinking like one sentence no life stories. Hopefully we get lots of them and I want to look at if you heard this episode and you answer us, I want to go see if I can find you in the stats. If you heard this episode and you answer us, I want to go see if I can find you in the stats. And so if you say like, oh, I listen, and if you're the person in Tanzania and you say I listened in Tanzania, I want to go see. Do we see someone in Tanzania? So let us know where are you. Tell us one sentence about yourself and we will report back with all the listener demographic data that we get.
Jordan:I love it. That's going to be fun. All right, so to have your response featured on our next episode, go ahead and tap the link in the show notes to Texas Show. And, as always, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.
Alban:So, Tom, one of my favorite episodes of the Office is when Michael and Jan come back from their trip together to Jamaica to Sandals, the Sandals Resort. And you recently came back and posted in our company project management software that you just came back from Jamaica with your wife. So how was Jamaica? How was the Sandals Resort?
Tom:That's right, that's right Two tickets to paradise. It was great, it's great. My wife and I went. We got to do all the Sandals activities, got to go scuba diving.
Jordan:Yeah.
Tom:Got to go sailing wakeboarding. You know I'm not. I can't, I just can't sit at the pool, you know, for that long, and you're eating and drinking a lot, and during the episode I talked about how much weight I lost, and on that weekend I only gained back four pounds. So Wow, only gained back four pounds, so you lost like 20 pounds in 20 days and you gave four pounds in three days in a weekend. Yeah, a lot of added sugar. A lot of sugar. Other beverages that turn to sugar.
Alban:That's awesome. So you scuba dived? Are you scuba certified?
Tom:Uh, yes, I got scuba certified in college and, um, I'm pretty sure I went scuba dived. Are you scuba certified? Uh, yes, I got scuba certified in college and, um, I'm pretty sure I went scuba diving once after I got married because, uh, my wife kit was like, oh yeah, I'll do this with you, and she got certified. We scuba dived one time and she's like I'm never doing it again and that was probably the last time we did it did she do it again this time? no, no way okay, so right, all right yeah so that's why I haven't scuba dived in so long. And it was funny because I'm trying to figure out where my certification is. And so I FaceTimed my daughter and ended up finding it in the drawer right next to my bed. So apparently I thought it was important enough to keep right next to my bed, but I didn't know it was there.
Alban:So it's been there 20 years You've been saving it for this moment.
Tom:More than 20 years, yes, been saving it for this one moment where she could take a picture and send it to me, so I could provide it to the Sandals Resort, so they could let me go scuba diving.
Jordan:And they did let you go scuba diving with it.
Tom:They made me jump in the pool and run through some stuff, but it was fun.
Jordan:I'm surprised you passed that with like I don't know. It seems like one of those things where, if you don't have your driver's license for like so long, you have to retake the test. You know what I mean. And scuba diving seems like pretty high stakes, so I'm surprised that they would just be like all right, you're good, it's a sandals.
Tom:You know it's a sandals. They want you to. They want you to have a good time.
Jordan:Safety is not a priority.
