Find Out If You're In The Top 50% Of Buzzsprout Podcasts

In this episode, Tom Rossi (co-founder at Buzzsprout) joins us to talk about the new Visual Soundbite feature and help breakdown how many downloads the average podcaster in Buzzsprout gets in 2020.

Total number of downloads in the last 30 days

• 98 downloads puts you in the Top 50% of podcasts
• 302 downloads puts you in the Top 25% of podcasts
• 982 downloads puts you in the Top 10% of podcasts
• 2,373 downloads puts you in the Top 5% of podcasts
• 14,959 downloads puts you in the Top 1% of podcasts

Top Podcast Apps

1. Apple Podcasts - 50.8%
2. Spotify - 18.3%
3. Castbox - 3.1%
4. Podcast Addict - 2.7%
5. Overcast - 2.5%
6. Stitcher - 2.2%

Top Devices

1. Apple iPhone - 57.9%
2. Android Phone - 23.1%
3. Windows Computer - 4.3%
4. Apple Computer - 2.3%
5. Apple iPad - 1.3%

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Chapters

• 0:00 Promising New Feature
• 1:07 Visual Soundbites Update
• 10:19 Amazon Podcasts Update
• 13:34 Buzzsprout Podcasts Breakdown

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

We have an update plan where we would like to, you know, I can't promise anything but we'd like to be able to give the ability to upload an artwork file specific for these videos, but a little hack if you want. Create your little your artwork file 1400 pixels by 1400 pixels attached to your episode. Then go create your soundbite and then when you're done if you don't actually want to use that as your episode artwork switch your episode artwork back so pro tip only heard it here not gonna hear it anywhere else. Especially cuz Tom's on the call. And he's like, yeah,

Alban: 0:29

you're triggering Tom right now with a hey, here's a cool feature. What if we go visit Tom's over there? Like, dude, I'm gonna do this to build this if people start writing i like i like

Tom: 0:38

that. It's no promises, no promises, but here's the way it's gonna work. This is what?

Travis: 0:45

So in today's episode, we actually have a very special guest with us. He's been on the podcast before but our very own Tom Rossi. He is joining us this week. Hey, Tom, how's it going?

Tom: 0:55

Good. Thanks for having me.

Travis: 0:56

So Tom has been doing some great work diving into the bus. sprout stats like looking at all of our podcasters. And so we got some cool stuff coming down the pipeline later in the episode, but we want to start with an update to a pretty popular feature inside of Buzzsprout. Kevin, do you want to talk about what we've added to the visual soundbites? Sure,

Kevin: 1:17

yeah, we rolled this out, I guess it's been a little more than a week ago. Now there is if you're not familiar with visual sound bites, go into your Buzzsprout account, click on one of your episodes and then look on the right side. There's a feature over there called visual sound bites, and it's where you can make like a lot of people call them audiograms their little videos. They're anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds long. You can create a video of a highlight of your podcast episode and then you can share that on whatever social platforms work for your podcast. So it's a lot of people share them on Instagram, a lot of people put them on Facebook and YouTube, things like that. There's different formats. There's different customization options, and we added a really new and exciting one in the last week and that is the ability to have it looks like a totally new theme. So before it would show your podcasts artwork a little bit small and you can put some text underneath it. Now you can just choose podcast artwork only, it blows your podcast artwork up to fill the full frame of the video. And yeah, it has like a wave audiogram thing, you can move it up and down. And in experimenting with like the design of that we realized like, you could actually move it off the screen, which wasn't good. But if you stop it halfway, it looks really cool, because then it's just it shows on the top of the video or the bottom half of the video. Anyway, we've been having a lot of fun with them. We created one and three out in the Facebook group. And then a bunch of people started creating their own versions of them and we're starting to see him on social media. So fun new way to promote your podcasts now, pre with your Buzzsprout account, hop in there and check it out.

Alban: 2:44

We had to make sure that that was out before we started talking about stats in case anyone was like all bummed out that they weren't in the 50 percentile or something then now you've got this whole new share feature number.

Tom: 2:56

Get those numbers up

Alban: 2:58

as soon as soon as I had Like the full screen image of my podcast cover, our people were like Click, click, click, click.

Travis: 3:06

So so just to kind of walk through what you had before versus what you have now. So before there was one style that you could create inside of Buzzsprout. And there are other services you can sign up for and pay monthly for to, like get a ton of customization features. But this was Nope, Alban says this is going in bad direction. Oh, no.

Alban: 3:26

I was just going Oh, no, I would never pay Why

Tom: 3:28

would you pay

Alban: 3:30

for that? Was that no to paying for it? Not a no to it not to.

Travis: 3:37

See that's that's the problem. When you have the host, the host hat and the editor hat on simultaneously, you're trying to read faces. So anyways, so before you only had one style, where like Kevin said you had your artwork, you had the title of your episode, you could add, like either the name of your podcast or you could customize those different fields and you could change some colors. But now you can just have your full podcast artwork. With the waveform that's animating as the audio is going in the background, and that's a video file, you can upload to Instagram or Facebook to again drive people back to your podcast. Now this new feature, does it support episode level artwork. So if they upload artwork for a particular episode, and then they create a visual soundbite for that episode, is it gonna pull that artwork? Or is it gonna pull the artwork they upload in their podcast settings?

Kevin: 4:25

Yeah, that's good question. It pulls the episode artwork. So if by default, you just use your podcast artwork for every episode, then they will all look the same. But as Travis mentioned, if you do upload individual episode artwork, whether it be every episode or just happened to do at one time, it will switch over to that. And that's a pretty, pretty nice little feature that you can do a little hack if you wanted to do we have an update plan where we would like to, you know, I can't promise anything, but we'd like to be able to give the ability to upload an artwork file specific for these videos. And so That's not out right now, and might happen at some point but a little hack. If you want, you could go ahead and create your little your artwork file 1400 pixels by 1400 pixels attached to your episode, then go create your soundbite and it would use that and then when you're done if you don't actually want to use that as your episode artwork switcher episode artwork back, were deleted and it would default back to your regular podcast artwork. And now you have custom artwork in your soundbite. So pro tip only heard it here not gonna hear it anywhere else. Especially because Tom's on the call. And he's like, yeah,

Alban: 5:33

you're triggering Tom right now with a hey, here's a cool feature. What if we do visit Tom's over there? Like, dude, I'm gonna want us to build this if people start writing, like,

Tom: 5:41

I like that. It's no promises, no promises, but here's the way it's gonna work. This is what you

Alban: 5:46

guys, here's what the designers on the team have mocked up this beautiful design. And then people over there on Tom's team, they're gonna be the ones building it.

Tom: 5:55

I think the visual soundbite though is a perfect example of something that Buzzsprout can bring to podcasts. that it doesn't do everything that you're going to get out of an application that that's all they do. But me and we do a lot with this with this last update, we do a lot. And it's just it makes sense for us to be able to do that when we can do it. And it doesn't take away from all the other features that we're building related to building out your podcast and promoting it. So I love it. I think it's a great feature.

Kevin: 6:20

Yeah, yeah. Well, I've spent a lot of time looking at some of those other applications. And they're all great. And I'm not taking anything away from them. But every time I go to use one of them, and we do because we like supporting them, it takes no less than 30 minutes and sometimes like more more close to an hour to actually create a soundbite that I'm really happy with. And it's because they have so many little bells and whistles in there that I end up playing with all of them and making it look exactly how I want but before I know it, I've invested 45 minutes or an hour in this thing. And the reality is that you don't have time to do that for every episode, especially if you want to create multiple different clips and share them on different social platforms. And so the idea that we came and settled on on Buzzsprout was how do we Make it easy for people to promote your episodes so that you can get in the habit of doing it every time because promotion is so important. Well, if it's gonna take you an hour to do it for every clip, you're not gonna do it. Like you might do it for your first one or two episodes. But at some point that's going to stop with Buzzsprout, visual soundbites. We designed it. So it can be something you do every time and you can stick with it, because it literally takes like five minutes or less. That's the whole idea here is that promoting your podcast shouldn't be this big, laborious thing that you have to do every time you do an episode. It can be something that's quick and easy and still effective. And so anyway, that's some of the thought behind how we're trying to build. Yeah, and why we make the decisions that we do.

Tom: 7:37

I think it's good because when you shared it on the Facebook group, when we first gave everybody a little sneak peek of it. People start chiming in with the features that they want to add to it. Well, can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this? And it's like, they don't realize if we add all that next thing, you know, you're, you've got the hour long process and we're trying to do the Buzzsprout version of what these other software's do keeping it simple, make it so they can quickly create that sound. bite and keep moving on.

Alban: 8:01

Yep. Yeah, the the Buzzsprout version is like giving you the chef's knife not giving you like the individual like banana slicer tool that you can buy on Amazon. Like there's other stuff that if you're cutting 10s of thousands of bananas a day, yeah, go get that specialized tool for this. And we're saying, Yeah, we're trying to give you have something that you can do pretty good of a job very quickly, and then move on. But if you're a massive podcast and you're trying to put something together that is like perfectly on brand, then it might actually make sense for you to go spend 45 minutes getting the perfect version in something like wave.

Travis: 8:36

Alban, do you own a banana? Banana slicer?

Alban: 8:39

No, I am actually very anti like all of the super kitchen appliance II kind of things. I like. We're we have three knives. We have a chef's knife. We've got a paring knife, and we've got a nice bread knife and I'm like no more knives so people will like give us knives. I'm like no get rid of these knives.

Tom: 8:56

I think I think we should put Amazon affiliate links in the episode. To the knives that Albin recommends.

Alban: 9:02

I tried to do that with the what was it hungry, hungry obey. And then I got Maria all excited about it. I was like it let me get the hungry root like referral ID and I obviously did not do a very good job like talking it out because nobody signed up. No is interested more people are interested in hearing Travis's HGTV show recommendations than hearing about my food delivery services so need to work on some of my ads.

Kevin: 9:29

But it's not a reflection of this podcast nor the effectiveness of affiliate marketing. advertising. The fastest way to kill a bad product is with good advertising. And so I think it's a reflection on the product. hungry, right?

Alban: 9:46

You're attacking. I feel like man I feel bad guys. I'm hungry. The food's good. I think just me trying to sell their product for them. I don't try to poach me away hungry. I don't think it's gonna work.

Tom: 10:01

Based on the performance, I don't think they will be so

Kevin: 10:04

yeah, I don't think but you're still a happy customer, right?

Alban: 10:07

Still just her I had some delicious food last night from hungry,

Travis: 10:11

some turnips.

Alban: 10:14

All route based.

Travis: 10:19

The last episode we talked about how Amazon has secretly not secretly started telling podcast hosts, you can tell your podcasters to submit to this future directory. And a lot of you did. Tom pulled the numbers, how many podcasters have submitted to the new Amazon podcast directory so far

Tom: 10:39

over 9000 of our podcasters have submitted to Amazon. So hopefully when it launches, a bunch of our Buzzsprout podcasters are going to be represented in the whatever it looks like. Whatever the amazon music, audible podcast listening experience looks like.

Kevin: 10:54

You know, I read an article I don't know if you guys saw it said something about audible had Announced like a little bit more information about podcasts coming to the audible platform. And they had some was exclusive shows or something that they were bringing the audible platform, they were selling a subscription that included the shows, but it was not going to include any, like independent podcasts at this time. And so, again, we know what you guys know, like we don't have a lot of inside information here. inside information we have from them is just basically how to send them podcasts. But as far as when they're going to launch and what it's going to include we don't really know so this was this was news to me that it was our understanding that amazon music and audible we're both going to be doing some independent podcast content, but it sounds like at least initially audible might not be including in the podcast content.

Alban: 11:46

Audible has done this before where they rolled out like a much the basic audible plans like 15 bucks and then they did like a five to $7 like get all the audible original podcasts though. They're not really podcasts. They're not like, consistent hosts talking through something. And it's definitely not an RSS feed. It's just like conversations that are recorded. I guess that's kind of what they were thinking of as a podcast. But um, that went away years ago. And now it kind of looks like they might be bringing it back. I'd kind of like if they would bring other podcasts into the app, because it makes it a better listening experience. If one of those, you know, pseudo podcasts were really cool, and you're really into them. Do I don't know if I personally found any that I liked.

Tom: 12:31

You use audible though, right?

Alban: 12:33

Yeah, I love audible. I'm a huge audible fan,

Tom: 12:35

it would seem like there's a natural fit. If you build a good audible experience. translating that into podcasts. It'd be a shame if they didn't bring in all the independent podcasts that we just submitted.

Alban: 12:48

Yeah, so we'll be interested to see what happens. Tom, I know you, you actually made it a bit easier. So now it's like a one click submission rather than going through kind of a form like we originally launched. So, maybe we could check in in a few weeks with, uh, maybe some higher numbers, maybe take it from 9000 to 18,000.

Travis: 13:08

Let's go baby. So yeah, so if you have not yet submitted your podcast for the future Amazon podcast directory, just go to the directories tab in your Buzzsprout dashboard, click on the Amazon button and then scroll down, read the terms and conditions and click yes and submit and will send your podcast on its way so that when Amazon does launch their podcast directory, your show will be listed there as well. So now let's talk about stats, specifically Buzzsprout stats. So Tom went deep into the archives of the played database and pulled all kinds of juicy numbers for us to talk about. So Tom, let me cue it up to you to just talk through your process for kind of how you pulled this data. And then we'll start walking through some of the observations that we can make and the takeaways for you as an independent podcast. If you're listening to this, and trying to figure out how well your show is doing, and how you can use some of the stats that are in your Buzzsprout dashboard to make your podcasts better moving forward.

Tom: 14:09

Sure. So just a little update what we've been working on in the back end is how we can use we have so much good information now across so many different podcasts in the Buzzsprout network. How can we use that information to help people to give them information that's going to help them as a podcaster. And we're not interested in just throwing out numbers we're interested in how can we help and one of the ways that I get excited about his encouraging I want I really want stats to be encouraging because I know how hard it is to stick with podcasting. And I know how the impact that a podcast even if it has a smaller listenership can have just by making an impact in 10 people like if you can get a message to impact 10 people that's powerful and so I hate when when stats become the overarching measurement of how I'm doing. So all that being said, I went into some new techniques to be able to look at the data and understand it. But then also how can we present it in a way that it's actionable can actually help the podcaster. And so this is just our first go at pulling in some of those numbers. But one of the first things I wanted to do was look at podcast trending through the COVID. experience. And it's very clear, I was wondering what it would look like, because we have so many new podcasts that are starting, you know, it's hard to figure out, Okay, well, how what's what's the way that I can look at it. So what I did was I looked at the average number of downloads per podcast since January, and you can see that it hits an all time low in, I think it was April, and then it's starting to trend back up by August. I would expect it to be back to where it was, but it depends on what you're looking at if you're looking at the average or the median, but either way, we see signs of recovery. that things are coming back to where it was in January.

Travis: 16:03

And so you've pulled the data through July. And so we're not yet at the end of August. That's why you don't have that data yet.

Tom: 16:08

Yeah. So I was trying to compare month over month. And so once August is done, then I'll pull in August, but I did pull August to date just to get an idea and see that it's doing better than July. So the numbers really point towards a good recovery for the number of downloads.

Alban: 16:24

I mean, that's really reassuring, because I know a lot of podcasters. Were asking about that, because they're like, man, my numbers have really taken a hit. And most people if the longer you're podcasting, hopefully your podcast is growing over time. And definitely that March, April, May, when a lot of people's lives were disrupted, people were not going into the office as much driving had gone way down. It really changed a lot of listening habits. And so I know a ton of people saw dips in their numbers. Can you give us an idea of what percent of a dip we saw? Like if somebody saw a 20% dip? Is that more than normal? Or you know what What's the right range for them to be looking at?

Tom: 17:02

Your numbers went down in April by about 20 23%. So the numbers, depending how you look at it is about a 20% dip, which is what we were hearing from podcasters. Right? We heard people saying, my numbers are down or, you know, or other people's numbers down, and am I doing something wrong? And I think the encouragement is, it's it's not, you know, everyone experienced a dip during that timeframe to a certain degree, and things are looking stronger. And so they should see those numbers starting to come back.

Kevin: 17:30

Yeah, I'm taking a look at that graph that you're sharing Tom. And it does look like if Gee, if we take January as the high point, even, I mean, in the US anyway, the pandemic locked down in the disruption of people's lives didn't really start hitting until March, but it's looked like February was down from January and March was down from February like there was already a downward trend. And I am wondering if this is seasonal, you know, we haven't we never went back and looked at the numbers for like, 2017 2018. So I'm just wondering We are attributing a lot of this to what's going on in the world right now with COVID-19. But some of it could be seasonal Anyway, these could be normal, healthy trends. And that would be a lot more data for Tom to pick through. But, you know, maybe if he's not busy in the next couple weekends or whatever, podcasting,

Alban: 18:17

it he's not rolling out features we promised on the podcast.

Tom: 18:20

Well, there's some other similar factors to consider, right, which is we also saw the number of active podcasts double in that same time period. So there's a lot more content for people to be able to consume. So it is possible that we might see numbers go down on average per podcast, just because there's more podcasts to listen to. And so Time will tell whether or not that translates into how people are listening to individual podcasts. But it's something to consider, you know, as we see those, just the sheer number, the sheer amount of content. I think for myself, I don't know about you guys, but from the beginning of COVID to where I am now. Like now I have my routine down, but it took me While to get to the place of when do I listen to my podcasts, and now I've actually got a system where I'm consuming more content, then even before COVID, you know, so I think all of those factors are going to be at play and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Kevin: 19:14

Yeah, that's definitely starting to happen. I've found myself listening to less because I wasn't driving nearly as much as I was. But somebody like my wife, who rarely listened to podcasts at all now she's she's been around the house a lot, and I rarely see her now without at least one earbud in and she's always listening to podcasts. Do you remember how I've talked before about how I'm not the world's biggest Joe Rogan fan? I like some of his guests sometimes. She is a total Joe Rogan fan really listens to his full three hours almost every every day. It's crazy. And that's like all she wants to talk about. She's like so so and so was on Joe Rogan. It's crazy. Is this real Kevin that meets like, no, this is real. I never would have pegged my wife for a Joe Rogan fan.

Alban: 19:54

This means she's like one of the top female Joe Rogan fans in my mind the Joe Rogan and basis 99.9% male.

Kevin: 20:02

Yeah, but he's gonna go exclusive to Spotify at the end of the year and we don't allow Spotify in our house. So I don't know.

Alban: 20:11

We'll see about that.

Tom: 20:13

This might be a little risque, but I got a speaker for the shower. Oh, nice.

Kevin: 20:20

I've thought about doing that.

Tom: 20:21

It's been life altering. It's awesome. And so I take much longer showers and I listen to podcasts like crazy.

Kevin: 20:27

your water bill is off the charts.

Alban: 20:28

You better watch Yeah, you put you started Joe Rogan episode and you're gonna get like heat burns or something. shower?

Tom: 20:35

Well, it will make it to my explicit filter. So don't worry, we're good. So that's kind of where we started. That was one of the questions I wanted to answer is month over month, how things are looking, what's the state of podcasting, and from looking at it, state of podcasting is strong, it's great looks like things are recovering tons, like I said, tons of new podcasts that are being created. And then I mean, there's there's so many different ways to look at the data. There are so many different ways to slice and dice it Again, at Buzzsprout, we've always valued the podcaster and making it something that's useful for them. It's not just, you know, throwing numbers at them. And so one of the things I wanted to do is give them something they could compare when they log into their dashboard in Buzzsprout. The first thing we show them is, hey, how have things gone for the last 30 days with your podcast? How many downloads Have you gotten within the last 30 days? And so what I did was take a look at how many downloads all of our podcasts in the entire network, get, or have gotten in the last 30 days? And then try to figure out, Okay, how is this data useful? And the first thing I figured out was the average is not useful. The average because you have a very small percentage like less than 5%, and probably more like 2% of our podcasts that are just exponentially greater in terms of the number of downloads that they get. So it skews any type of average. So you really have to look at the median. And so for the non statistics people out there It's really just being able to answer the question of how do I stack up compared to the other podcasts at Buzzsprout. And so the numbers that I actually shared some numbers earlier on Facebook, and I've altered those numbers a little bit by filtering just to what we would call like active podcasts trying to make it so that maybe it's a little bit a better comparison. But what you look at there is about 98 downloads in the last 30 days. So what's today? What's today August something 26

Kevin: 22:29

There we go. Well, it'll be 28 when this episode comes out,

Tom: 22:32

right, right. So in the last 30 days from today, I pulled I pulled the numbers this morning, if you had 98 or more, you are in that top 55th percentile. That means that half of the Buzzsprout subscribers when they go in, they log in and they go to their stats page, half of them will see a number that's lower than yours. I say that right? Is it clear?

Travis: 22:54

Yes. And just to say median in a slightly different way. Sure. If Hypothetically, we were looking at 10,000 podcasts, the median would be if we ranked all those based on the total number of downloads, they got podcast number 5000. This is the numbers that they are seeing.

Tom: 23:11

Yep. Yeah, that's a good way to think of it if you sorted it, and then right in the middle, that's where it would be.

Alban: 23:16

My favorite example of median versus average. I think this is one of my stats classes was, if you've got 10 people at a bar, and they all make $50,000 each, you're like, Okay, the meeting is 50,000. But then if Bill Gates walks in the room, the average the person makes in there is over a billion dollars. All right, everyone would feel like a failure because they go, Oh, I'm not even close to a billion, I must be like way down there. Well, the median is still 50,000. The average would be over a billion and it's just trying to filter out those ones that really skew the numbers. We're trying to make sure they don't matter as much.

Tom: 23:53

And if you think about it, it's not relevant. It's not relevant to the podcaster to know the average because it's so far skewed. But the but the median, the median is pretty useful because it gives me an idea of Am I am I on the right track? Am I am I at least doing what other people on the Buzzsprout platform are doing? And I think that's, that's why it has some value. And Kevin's got some great ideas for how we might be able to incorporate data like this actually into the experience, because we hear it all the time, right where podcasters You know, they're nervous. Am I doing a good job? And that's really what they're asking, am I doing a good job? And I hate that they go to statistics to answer that question. I, you know, I hate it, but they do. And so Kevin's got some ideas of how we might be able to use the work that we're doing right now to bring that into the UI so that we can show them how their stats compare to the overall Buzzsprout network of all podcasts. And so that's kind of you know, the the overarching thinking there.

Travis: 24:49

So Tom, are you promising a feature that has not come out yet?

Tom: 24:52

No, no, I'm saying Kevin is probably. Yeah, I'm gonna put it on Kevin. He has to come up with a way to do it.

Kevin: 25:01

Just to be clear, I've come up with plenty of ways to do things before but that doesn't mean they get implemented. Yeah. All right. So Tom, walk us through some more the numbers 50 to be in the top 50%, you need 98. Nine downloads in the last 30 days. What about to be like in the top 40%? Or 30%? What are those numbers look like the top

Tom: 25:19

25%. So 302, I think is interesting, because it's not that big of a jump, right? So you go from 98 to 302. If you have 302 or more, that means that 75% of the podcasters on Buzzsprout, when they log in will see a number less than yours. That's pretty incredible. Because it's not it's achievable. Yeah, it's achievable. It's not like it's not out there.

Kevin: 25:43

I'm gonna have to create some visual sound bites, but yes, you can do it.

Tom: 25:47

Yeah, you need some sound bites to be able to drive traffic like that. So that's at the 75 percentile, that's 302. And then it goes up crazy when you get to the 90 percentile, so then it gets to 908 too. So really. So that's the being the top 10% of Buzzsprout podcasters, you need 982 downloads in the last 30 days. Yeah. And then look how quickly it starts to rise to get from 90 to 95%. So to get another into the top 5% of podcasters, you got to have over 2373 downloads in the last 30 days. So anybody listening to this podcast can go into the Buzzsprout dashboard, and bring up those numbers. And that gives them kind of an idea of where they stack up.

Kevin: 26:34

All right, just for fun, just for fun. How do you how do you get into the top 1%?

Tom: 26:38

The top 1% you need to have 14,959 downloads in the last 30 days.

Alban: 26:44

So Buzzcast is not in the top 1%.

Travis: 26:49

Yeah, yeah. So just to give you a frame of reference in the last 30 days, Buzzcast has 5400 downloads so we'd be between the one and 2% Yeah. Buzzsprout podcasts. are long standing, how to start a podcast, the UI of the Buzzsprout produce podcasts is closer. We've had 11,571 downloads in the last 30 days. So that one's got that one's still doing well, Alban, something about the dynamic of those two hosts, really, I think just sets that

Alban: 27:20

people love it.

Travis: 27:21

So that number, when is when you go to stats, the first tab, you're going to see use your podcast overview. It's that first purple number, where it says this many downloads in the last 30 days. That's what we're talking about. So but what if they go to apps and devices? I know that you also pulled data for what kinds of podcasts listening apps people are using, and the devices they're using to listen to those. So what were some of the number breakdowns for that?

Tom: 27:44

Yeah. So this is interesting, and I'd like to hear from you of how you would process it, but it would definitely be interesting to compare these numbers to what they're seeing on their podcast. So for example, across all of our network in the last 30 days, what you're seeing is about 50 just Almost 51% of our downloads were from the apple podcast app. So not just an Apple device, but the apple podcasts app represents 51%. I mean, that's, that's massive. That is crazy. And it dwarfs. So the next one below it is a company, it's a little company might heard. It's called Spotify and Spotify had 18%. So I thought I really thought they were gonna be closer than they were. And maybe it's because you know, Buzzcast isn't listed on Spotify. And so

Alban: 28:33

we're taking the numbers

Tom: 28:34

we're taking, we're taking the numbers. And so I think those are those are interesting numbers for people to log in and see how how do they compare to the overall network? Are they trending more on Apple? Are they trending more on Spotify?

Alban: 28:46

Are there other apps that you can tell us are there some of the other ones that go down a bit? Where are we looking at for like stitcher overcast or podcast with those guys? Yeah. So

Tom: 28:56

what you see you know, Apple and Spotify combined, represent Almost whatever 70%. So then the other 30% is distributed pretty much across a lot of different apps. So the next one below that would be castbox castbox got 3.1% of the downloads, which is great and podcast addict 2.7%, overcast at two and a half percent stitcher 2.2%. We also see the Buzzsprout site. So people that actually use the Buzzsprout site, and that's where people are listening is just over 2%. And the embedded players also at about 2%.

Travis: 29:29

I'm surprised to not see Google podcasts on this list. Still, I know they've been lagging for quite a while. But I know the last time john did his presentation, either end of last year, beginning of this year, they were starting to creep up into that one 2% range. They are number. Let's see. Looks like they're number 10.

Tom: 29:50

They're at 2.1% to 2.1% of the downloads in the last 30 days. Were from the app, the Google podcast app.

Travis: 29:58

Yep. So I know they have plans to to sunset, Google Play Music, and they're taking all of the podcasts and putting them in Google podcasts and all the music and putting them in youtube music. So hopefully that will make Google podcasts more of a player, at least in it being a podcast right through people are listening to podcast addict is an Android only podcast player. Spotify and Stitcher are obviously available on Android. And so why don't you walk through the difference between iPhone users versus Android uses? usage? Yeah, got that number as well.

Tom: 30:29

Yeah, that's what's interesting, right? Because podcast addict is only available on Android, right? And it represents 2.7% of the downloads. But Android is only which percent. So of all of the downloads in the last 30 days, 23% of them are on Android devices. So that's it. They don't have a lot of market share. And yet podcast addict is doing really well. So I think it must be a good player. I don't have an Android so I've been able to use So some of the other devices off device would be Apple iPhone at 57.9%. So, almost 58% of the downloads are on an Apple device

Travis: 31:11

on an iPhone specifically. Yep. Cuz I know I see all you also have iPad way down there on the list too. So that's just iPhones. Correct.

Alban: 31:19

That's pretty remarkable to think how much just Apple being early to the game and having the iTunes directory, renamed Apple podcasts and I'll get correct on that. But it started out as iTunes and launching all of that and kind of making podcasts front and center early has really given them this massive lead. I mean, that we're still seeing numbers like this is pretty remarkable, considering all of the attention that podcasting has gotten from Google and Spotify future looking like Amazon who knows what, uh, you know, Netflix and Microsoft will get in the game too. But

Tom: 31:55

do you have any idea what the market share is of the mobile market in the US for Apple Because that that really could explain it because 83% of the downloads are mobile. So in other words, 83% of the people that downloaded to listen to an episode, we're doing it on a mobile device, and the majority of them are in the US. So if Apple owns the mobile market in the US, then you would expect that iPhone is going to be your top device.

Alban: 32:22

So according to statistica.com share of people with iPhones in the US is 45.2%.

Tom: 32:32

Last year, wow. Yeah.

Alban: 32:33

Which is crazy to think like 45% of the phone, people have an iPhone. And yet, what do you say Tom? It's a 58% of the people listening to podcasts are listening on an iPhone on an iPhone. So basically, it means if you've got an Android, you're much less likely to be listening to podcasts. And I really think it is. Apple has had that purple app for a long time. That it's By default, it's there. And so people probably go, Oh, that's cool. And they click it, they go, Oh, that, you know, I'd be interested to learn, you know, listen to how I built this or something. And, you know, they start getting into some podcasts.

Kevin: 33:12

Let's talk about the mobile verse like desktop breakdown. Do you have those numbers on

Tom: 33:19

here? Yeah, mobile is 83% 83 that I mean, I'm just shocked. Um, and so then the next below that is going to be computer at only seven and a half percent. So you just the majority, the vast majority of the downloads are happening mobile. I mean, which makes sense for me. Even when I'm listening in the shower. I'm using my phone.

Kevin: 33:41

You don't have the laptop stand in the shower. Yeah,

Tom: 33:44

I just wanted to bring that back. I just want to bring that back into the discussion.

Travis: 33:47

I don't feel like I

Alban: 33:48

just edit out in two places. What, why would you edit that out? The top What about light pack. I'm hearing all these these these things about these. Smart TVs you can't buy a TV that's smart. Have the smart TVs broken into the podcasting space

Tom: 34:06

holding 0.3%

Alban: 34:10

I want to know who the people are that are listening on their new iMac or smart TVs, like, Hey, you guys want to go Come sit around the sitting around the radio in like the 40s. You know, and you turn it on, everyone's sitting around listening to it. You're like trying to relive that experience with your Smart TV. I just

Tom: 34:28

think about using the TV remote to find the podcast, like what a horrible experience that would have to be

Travis: 34:36

perhaps that represents the number of BestBuy employees that are listening to podcasts on the display today's

Tom: 34:43

they're saying, hey, look, you can listen to podcasts on this TV.

Alban: 34:47

That's half of the downloads right there.

Tom: 34:50

So so this is interesting. I'd love to hear from you guys because like I get buried in this data, I look at it and I'm like my eyes just start to go blank. And so how, how would you recommend someone use that information? How can that benefit the podcaster? Everything that we just talked about in terms of the top apps that are using it? And whether it's mobile or not? What What does that what does that do for the podcaster?

Alban: 35:15

I have a few high level takeaways. One, your podcast is doing well, if you're getting I mean, you're doing above average, if not above average, above median, if you're getting 100 plays per app in the first 30 days in the last 30 days. So that's great. So if you're around that area, you're probably doing pretty well. And then I'd probably look at some of those apps. I some of the ones that you mentioned being in the top 10. If I didn't see any plays, I think I'd probably dive in to be like, Oh, am I not listening podcast addict for some reason. I might maybe use it as kind of just a check. And then the, the one that really sticks out to me is if mobile usage is so high, you really got to optimize your show notes and your artwork. In everything for mobile usage, and we're always working on podcasts on our computers. So it might be easy to imagine that people are listening on their computers, but it really is a mobile phone centric experience. I don't know if I would dive too much too deep into the data and try to tease out why is this gone up point 2% or down point 1%? Or like, how many of my listeners are on smart TVs? Like that's kind of fun to see. But it's also, I don't know if it teaches me anything. Do you feel like it leads you to any conclusions that I hit not me?

Kevin: 36:36

Well, I know there's a lot of people in the podcasting space who are interested in smart speakers and fewer people interested in smart TVs. But what caused this surge in podcasting to happen was was mobile phone devices like the fact that you can easily have a screen where you can type things or you can see something and click on it and and find new podcasts and data packages being like more affordable. So it doesn't matter if I have actually downloaded or some or before I left the house, right like moving from an iPod to an iPhone, lets me not have to load all my media before I leave the house. This is what's responsible for the huge surge in podcasting overall. And so there's Is there a place to have a successful podcast that plays on Alexa devices? I'm sorry, I said the word if everyone's devices are now popping off at your house. Yeah, there is there will be a few shows that are are very successful on those platforms, daily briefings and stuff like that there might be specific use cases. But at the end of the day, podcasting is a is like a phone a mobile centric platform. It's a very passive medium. People listen to podcasts while they're driving while they're working out while they're walking around the block. And we have to remember that when we do our shows, so the idea that Oh, if I just drop a link in my in my show notes or my episode description, like that's enough, it's really not like you if you really want to drive traffic to affiliate partners or sponsors, things like that, you have to include that stuff in the same ways that you're promoting your podcast if you're promoting on social. And you have a sponsor for that episode, mentioned the sponsor while you're promoting your episode, if you get to the point, again, where you're trying to grow your show, or if you're trying to make ancillary income, is it through your podcast channel, consider setting up your own website again, Buzzsprout gives you a great starter website. So you don't need one day one. But if you want to take it to the next level, set up your own website, start creating blog posts or some sort of individual website and page for every episode, use the embed player, drop in good shownotes drop in transcripts. Remember that it's not always going to happen when people are listening to your show in real time. I'm sure there's a lot of numbers that we spit out today, as Tom was running through that stuff that you might be thinking, Oh, I want to write those down. We'll put them in the show notes. But it's not happening right now, while you're out. You know, walking your dog or driving in your car. When you're listening to this. It's gonna have to be at a different time. And so just remember that's true as you You're trying to grow your show and connect with your audience and provide them resources in a in a manner. That's, I don't know, what would you say? Like, like usable for them? Like, remember how people are listening?

Tom: 39:10

Yeah. So do you do you think that there is also something to take away from the fact that such a strong number of downloads are mobile, in terms of YouTube, and your podcast? Like I hear that people talk about, I'm using YouTube for my podcast. The mobile experience on YouTube is miserable, at my opinion, is it's miserable. So it's it? Is it wrong to say if your podcast if you're exclusively on YouTube, if you're not putting it up in the podcast network and an RSS feed or something like that, you're missing out on 83% of the traffic or 82% of the traffic that Buzzsprout sees. Is that that too bold of a statement?

Alban: 39:50

I think there's people that use YouTube for just listening. But for those people that better experiences just to do that inside of a podcast app. Like if they're using their phone. They're just doing something They're playing some of the background just as a conversation, then you might as well be using a podcast app. And that's what we always recommend. If you're going to put something onto YouTube, you're trying to optimize for someone sitting at their computer trying to be more engaged. And so that means like having this visual component filming the actual conversation, if we were to put this podcast episode on there, you know, we'd probably clip it to be just the discussion about the stats, not the whole episode, and Travis and maybe like, try to put together the visual component of all of our faces as we're discussing, like you want something visual to keep people's attention, because when you're sitting down to YouTube, you're expecting to watch it. And if you're just staring at someone's artwork for an hour and a half, you're pretty much you're gonna bounce pretty quickly. It's not going to keep your attention when there's like, all these viral videos on the sidebar, like promising new really exciting stuff.

Tom: 40:53

Yeah, kittens, kittens normally. But when you think about when you think about the visual soundbite, I think A great example. Because a, it's inevitably somebody will say, Can I just create this for my whole episode, and then post that on YouTube? To which no one, no one wants that. No one wants to go, listen,

Kevin: 41:13

we've seen a lot of good podcasts, like YouTube channels, when podcasts do that, and they just take their numbers, they completely kill the handicap their channel. And so, again, YouTube being all algorithm driven, you want to feed that algorithm stuff that it likes, and it does not like content like that. And so if you're trying and the reason that you'd put stuff there is to be discovered, well, if you put stuff there to be discovered that the algorithm doesn't like you're not helping yourself, you're hurting yourself and you're hurting yourself long term, because when you do or if you ever do start putting out good content that it likes. Now you're starting behind the behind the eight ball a little bit, you got to catch up back to zero, and then you got to start moving forward. And so we never recommend doing stuff like that. Now, on the other hand, if you do a visual sound bite type thing or a headliner thing or a wave thing, teasers, they perform just fine. You know, short super short content like that no big deal algorithm will eat that up and spit it out to people all day long. Because you're going to get like, as a percentage of the video that people will watch, there's a much better chance that you're gonna get a high percentage. So if you put it on a minute long video, and people are watching 30 seconds of it before they move on to another video when they're watching 50% of my video, YouTube loves that. If I put out a 45 minute podcast episode, and people only listen to the first one or two minutes before they bounced the algorithms gonna say no, this is not good content, stop serving it up to people.

Travis: 42:28

Well, Tom, thank you for joining us for this episode of Buzzcast. And I know in the future as we continue to pull out these little nuggets from our Buzzsprout network of shows and find little things that we can share to help you make informed decisions about how to make your show better moving forward and even just to encourage you to let you know kind of how you're doing compared to other people that are on similar paths. We'll we'll definitely bring Tom back to share those with you. If you have not yet done so. Make sure you subscribe to our Buzzsprout YouTube channel where I can promise you You will see actual videos of faces in their mouths moving. We put, we put our Podcasting Q&A show on YouTube. And we put a ton of different valuable videos like podcasts, microphone reviews and step by step software tutorials and strategy videos. So if you want to level up your podcasting game, then subscribing to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel is one of the best ways that you can do that. But that's it for us for this week, and we'll catch you in the next one.