How do you measure podcast success? And do you need to know about bitrates or loudness? Part Two of Two

It's part two of our dive into the Podcaster Cares Survey data. This time around, we're talking NFTs, measuring success, social media, loudness, and bitrates.

We also take a look at some interesting differences between podcasters of five years or more, and folks who've been doing it less than five years.

Podcasters of 5 years or more have stronger opinions on Apple Podcasts and RSS Feeds

• 67.5% of the 5 years or more group agreed that a podcast isn’t really a podcast if it doesn’t have an RSS feed.
• Of the folks in podcasting for fewer than five years, 39.8% agreed, whilst 38.9% didn’t care. 
• 25.3% in the 5 years or more group didn’t care about RSS feeds.
• 44.6% of the 5 years or more group believe that Apple could and should be doing more to help podcasters. This is compared to 34.9% of the newer podcasters group.
• 53% of the newer podcasters have no real opinion on Apple either way, compared to 34.9% of the 5 years or more group. 

Newer podcasters pay less attention to podcast loudness & bitrates

• 60.2% of podcasters of 5 years or more have a set and consistent loudness level for their show.
• This is compared to 31.4% of folks podcasting for 0-5 years. 
• 29.7% of newer podcasters don’t worry about loudness levels.
• This is compared to only 15.7% of the 5 years or more group. 
• 42.9% of newer podcasters have no idea what bitrates are. Only 15.7% of the 5 years or more group thought the same. 

Get the full Podcaster Cares Survey Report right here. 

Transcript

 Colin:
Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Podcraft. This is the show all about podcasting, helping you to grow a successful show. I'm calling Grey from the podcasthost.com and I've joined by Matthew, as always. How are you getting on, Matthew?

Matthew:
Yeah, indeed. Here. Indeed. I'm doing well. We'll see if we're joined also by my daughter, which it's become an ongoing thing. I don't think we will be. I feel bad, she's such a friendly, happy wee thing, but anytime I hit record on anything and now it just seems to send some sort of subliminal message. She's maybe like "dad, you're really bad at that and you need to stop doing it. Go get a real job, go and cut the grass or something".

Colin:
Remember that article you wrote a while back worth checking this out if you're listening. Matthew wrote an article which was, was it super powers of podcasters? Or what can tell you, you're a podcaster. And one of them was your ability to turn on a lawnmower with the power of your microphone. Soon as you turn on the mic, a lawn mower outside, it'll switch itself on.

Matthew:
Yeah, happens to the best of us.

Colin:
No, you've got it. Turning on baby crying.

Matthew:
Yeah. And 2020 people would be like, "oh, that's nice and cute. And a bit now they like, "that needs to stop now". So no...

Colin:
That's funny.

Colin:
So are you ready to get on with the stats again then? So this is part two of our, what do podcasters care about stats episode.

Matthew:
Yeah. Surely am, surely am glad to dive in.

Colin:
Yeah, we finished up. So if you haven't listened to the previous episode out there, we finished up last time on, what was it? The riveting subjects of the podcast, 2.1 name space and the subject of policing content and censorship, whether that's a topic. So if you want to know if podcasters care about either those, then go back and listen to the previous episode or nip over and watch the article, read it even over at Matthew, take it away. Short link. Is there one?

Matthew:
The podcasthost.com/cares.

Colin:
Cares. Nice work. You were prepared there.

Matthew:
As in the care bears. Remember that?

Colin:
Cool. And before we jump into it, I'll just say this episode is of course sponsored by, supported by our paid product, which is Alitu. Alitu Is our podcast maker app, which helps you make your podcast in the most easy way possible. Recording, editing production, audio cleanup, and publishing your podcast, it's all in there. If you want to make your podcast in the quickest, easiest way possible, go over to Alitu.com. A-L-I-T-U.com and you can get a seven day free trial to give a shot. All right, let's jump into it. So, first one in the second part of this, Matthew is our NFTs welcome and podcasting. What do you think?

Matthew:
Yeah, NFTs is I call them. So back at the time of the year, when you introduced me to this concept and you kind of explained it to me, my first thought was that just sound really stupid. And I'm not a completely...

Colin:
Haven't change that.

Matthew:
...deviated from that. I think so. Let me be straight, the concept of like owning a cartoon monkey and that to me is just weird and frivolous. That said, I do collect like games workshop miniatures. So I'm prepared to also put myself out there as somebody who collects weird things. But where I think this did seem really interesting to me was the generative aspect of it, which obviously doesn't have to have anything to do with NFTs. But when we started to talk about that idea of creating genre of podcasts, where you would have maybe an audio drama, where there's all bits of different dialogue and you could basically make thousands of different episodes out of the same script.

Colin:
All different companies.

Matthew:
That to me was really interesting and quite exciting. So yeah, we sort of worked away on a little project of our own a few months ago, didn't we?

Colin:
Yeah, we did.

Matthew:
But without realising how controversial a topic this was. We obviously got a fair bit of feedback if you could call it that. And yeah, that prompted us to put this question into the survey didn't it? Just to get a sort of layer of the land at this stage.

Colin:
Yeah. That's it exactly. Yeah. Just to see what people think about it. And yeah, we didn't explain it. Actually. NFT stands for Non Fungible Tokens. The very quick explanation is, it works on same principles as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum and stuff like that. It basically means that you can create a digital asset on the internet that's then minted, they call it on the blockchain, the blockchain being the kind of the software behind cryptocurrency. The thing that makes a Bitcoin unique so that you can own a Bitcoin and nobody else can own that same Bitcoin, you can do that for art, essentially. So you can create a bit of art, whether that's a picture, a video or an audio clip, and you can then mint that piece of art on the blockchain so that it makes it unique and it makes it ownable. And that's what makes it, as Matthew said, the ridiculous concept of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a cartoon of a monkey, it was essentially just something became fashionable. They became fashionable and because they were unique, because they were collectable, people paying a lot of money for them, essentially.

Colin:
So yeah, you can go over and check out our article there. If you go to there's no short link for this one, I'm afraid just go to the podcasthost.com/nfts. I'll create that for you afterwards. So there is a short link. I'll just create it now and you can find that. And it's an explanation of how it all works if you're interested, but there's definitely a lot of downsides to it, as well as some upsides, mainly around being able to build community and offer kind of extra value to your audience and audience kind of buying into your brand and stuff like that. So it's interesting. We're keeping an eye on it, but definitely I don't think it's quite there yet for a lot of podcasters. Anyway, let's get to this stat. This is a kind of one with a bit of background. So do you think NFTs can or should have a place in podcasting? What were the responses, Matthew?

Matthew:
Yeah. So 20% said that they didn't know what NFTs were. 25% said yes.

Colin:
As a role I thought.

Matthew:
Could or should. The people that didn't really care were 26%. And the people who said no were 28%. So pretty much neck and neck were those top three, I would say. In fact, pretty close with all the answers. God.

Colin:
Yeah, totally. So it's interesting. Yeah. I mean a quarter of people, one in four people saying, yes, they want NFTs in. So I mean, I think that was what we got from when we put our project out, wasn't it? We realised we should have explained a lot more about our thinking behind it, how we wanted to use it, the types of blockchains, as in there's a lot of environmental concerns with some of the blockchains out there, we were looking at a much more environmentally friendly one. So this kind of reflects that very polarised view, I think around NFTs, quarter saying yes, quarter saying no, and the other half saying either they don't know what it is or they don't care. So yeah, I think it's definitely something to keep an eye on. I think it's someone that could work well, but it's definitely not quite there yet at all, not quite, it's not at all there yet. Okay. Our podcast are social next step, step stat. I am not on form today, Matthew, with my words, how important do you think your use of social media is when it comes to growing your podcast of who are here?

Matthew:
Yeah, that was that slide and scale answer. So very much not important to very important. So we've just got a step style graph here, like 0.7% saying not important at all, that was probably just me and up to 47.1% saying that was very important with them. 30.5% with the same biggest answer there. So yeah. Obviously a lot of people do really value social media. Despite my attempts in previous to persuade them otherwise. Do what works for you. If you think social works for you, if you know social works for you keep doing it. My gripes have never really been about the promotion aspect, it's more just what happens when you're on these platforms. But I think there's ways to optimise it. If you want to post out about your episodes, you might have said this before, but you might look at just setting a time to go on your computer and do that. You might not want to have an app like Instagram, like Twitter, sorry, or Instagram on your phone so that you don't get sucked into the timelines and start arguing with people and that. So there are ways you could use it. You could automate stuff as well. So definitely, there's obviously a place for it in many people's promotion strategies and that's fine.

Colin:
There's no question. It can be a good way to grow your community, to engage with your community, to get feedback, to find out what people want to hear more of, to take questions, that kind of stuff. I think you're right in that it needs to be a bit more, I feel like it needs to be a bit more strategic than most people use social. As in most people just sort of fire out some links to the latest episodes, but it needs to be a bit more around that building community offering a lot more value, but being a bit unique and standing out. But yeah, for sure, shows here, the stats shows that podcasters do care about social. They want to put it out there on social media, think it's important. So that's good.

Colin:
All right. Next one. How do podcasters measure success? Now, this was a cool one. Actually, I like this Matthew. There's lots of ways podcasters can measure success. So rate these in order of preference. Shall we just count up? Let's count up from the bottom one. So let me, shall I jump into it? And then you can kind of comment on a few of them as we go?

Matthew:
Yeah. So just for clarity, they were asked to put these in order. So it was one of the forms where that you putting the most important one at the top and so on.

Colin:
Yeah. So we had eight measures of success. Top on average was a spike and download numbers. So that's how people measure success, is a spike in their download numbers. What do you think of that?

Matthew:
It's the hardest metric you could get isn't? Here are the people listening, there are the number. There you go. What more can you say?

Colin:
Yep. No, there is something to that, but I don't know, I still think download numbers, there are not a brilliant measure though, because then you compare your wooden boats podcast numbers to the video games podcast numbers, and there's obviously a much bigger audience in the video games one, the bigger market is always going to have bigger download numbers. The market with less competition is always going to have bigger download numbers. So many other factors to it, there's even just the engagement side of things. Like some of the big popular shows, like Tim Ferriss and Rogan and all them. Some of them have very engaged sets of users, but they have millions of listeners, but a massive amount of those listeners are not engaged. They just jumped on because it was a famous name and they don't actually listen to the show and just qualify. I'm not saying that I wouldn't like to have as many listeners as Tim Ferris or Joe Rogan, but just on the smaller scale, you have shows which have quite a lot of download numbers, which don't have half as much engagement as a show with like 10 times less download numbers. So I think it's much more about engagement, but anyway, it is a hard number. It is a good number to at least look at to see the trends. So yeah.

Matthew:
What's worth qualifying to as well. You only ever, like you're saying Colin, you only ever want to compare your download numbers with your own download numbers. So a spike for you...

Colin:
Yes.

Matthew:
Fair enough. A spike might not mean you'd keep any of the listeners, but you're looking at it and thinking, okay, I've got the attention of these extra listeners. What can I do in my episode to maybe keep a few of them around? But yeah, never obviously compared them to other podcasts because they could be in totally different markets.

Colin:
Totally, cool. Okay. Next one, number two was, and then going right to this, actually the engagement side of things. Number two was an email from a listener and very similar was a positive rating and review as well. They're both good metrics to me. I like them.

Matthew:
Yeah. That is someone taking, we laugh about ratings and reviews sometimes I think purely because people had the misconception that they would get them into some sort of chart and stuff like that. But you know what, when you think about the fact that someone's taking a moment out their day to go and write that review for you, as long as it's a good one, or even if it's a bad one, you've stabbed some in them enough that they've taken some time out to give you feedback. So that's no mean feat, is it?

Colin:
No, it's brilliant.

Matthew:
Actually, somebody sitting down to write to you write your email.

Colin:
That is a big deal. And it reflects on the next one as well. Good feedback. Number four, good feedback from a listener on social, going back to the social. But again, somebody taking time out their day. Then you've got ones that jump in more to the financial side. I wonder why these were lower. What do you think Matthew, we've got number five, a new patron, patron? Patreon person or a financial banker, number six was a product sale, and number seven was a customer lead. I wonder why. Why do you think the actual kind of financial gain was a bit lower down in the podcast occurs there?

Matthew:
Could well be that just less people are doing that. Less people are monetizing. Although when we go back to the start of the survey, most people were interested in monetizing. But yeah.

Colin:
Maybe not that stage potentially?

Matthew:
And maybe they just value the other things more. Even if you do value a product sale, maybe you think, well, getting more downloads will give me more opportunities to get more of those, therefore that is more important. So there'll be a home on there.

Colin:
Totally, get you. Yeah. And it's the impact you're making as well, isn't it? Like an email from a listener saying what they, well, this is presuming it's a positive email, isn't it? A positive email saying that you've made an impact on their life. You've made a difference to them. I mean that's amazing compared to, I mean a sales brilliant, but yeah. That's even better like making that impact. The last one and the last number eight was the amount of likes and episode get some social. So that was a good one.

Matthew:
See, I told them all those spoke in that last one were wrong. I was right. So yeah. But I've had that awkward conversation with podcasters before where they've, kind of asked us, my Instagram post got 400 likes, but my episode itself only got 20 downloads, there must be something wrong with the download stats and you're saying, no, it's just not the same thing. It's very easy to push your E-heart button. But listening to a podcast is a more long form commitment.

Colin:
Yeah, for sure. Okay. Next section. So the next part is actually less about direct stats and more about looking at the kind of split between older podcasters and your podcasters. Isn't it, Matthew. We looked at that kind of area around five years or so. So what's that 2017. So that seemed like the good split. We looked at a few different splits in terms of new podcasters versus old podcasters. And that was the one that kind of stood out as having the biggest differences on a stats. So what did we see there, Matthew?

Matthew:
Yeah. So 67 and a half percent of the five years or more group agreed that a podcast isn't really a podcast if it doesn't have an RSS feed. So is that more traditionalist aspect coming through and the folks that have been around longer?

Colin:
Yeah, for sure, isn't it. It's like the people that have been around longer, they were more indoctrinated. So before more than five years ago, you're more indoctrinated into the kind of traditional method because you had to care about the RSS feed. There's probably still some people manually creating their RSS feedback in 2016, 2017. I mean, it was much easier at the time, but there's still a lot of the proportion, I would suggest, of people doing podcasting who are very technical was probably larger. So yeah. I think that's probably just a more traditional thing. What do you think? Does that make sense?

Matthew:
Yeah, definitely. It shows, I think, the way the landscape's changing, the way technology's improved to the point where most people affect everyone just doesn't need to know about how it all works now because there's, things that will just set up for you at the front end.

Colin:
Yeah exactly. Yeah. You don't need to care at all. You're much more open to the idea that it's just Spotify, if they release your podcast on Spotify and it doesn't have an RSS feed at all, you're like, I don't care those people listening. That's what it's all about. It's about listeners. The other part was about apple podcast. Wasn't it? That was the other. Just to be clear, that was the main split we saw, or the main difference we saw with old podcasters versus new podcast was about RSS feeds, but also about opinions on apple as well. What did we see there?

Matthew:
44.6% of the five years or more group believe that Apple could and should be doing more to help podcasters that's compared to 34.9% of the newer podcasters group. So again, I think we talked about this back when we covered the Apple answers that, although it is still the biggest directory out there and in the big two comfortably, it was definitely much more important back in the day, especially when it was like iPod and syncing the iPod and your iTunes desktop app and Apple was everything to most people. So it shows that like older podcasters, like ourselves, you still see it as the holy grail don't you?

Colin:
Yeah.

Matthew:
Got competition now.

Colin:
Totally. I mean, you could say that at some points in podcasting history, Apple iTunes, as it was, that was podcasting, wasn't it? It's like if you weren't on iTunes it didn't exist. And a massive amount of people actually listened through the iTunes app. Like they downloaded, I remember downloading audio files in the iTunes app on my desktop and then transferring it to an MP3 player. And there were otherwise to listen, but that was the easiest, that was the most direct, the most simple, even though it wasn't simple in any way. So I think people grew up with that and anyone that's been in podcasting longer than 3, 4, 5 years, certainly Apple's still a massive weight on podcasting. I don't know, I still don't think even though we've been around, I think we said Matthew, we still don't think that it is Apple's responsibility though, it's an open ecosystem, it's for the creators, it's for anyone to really own. So I don't think Apple has that responsibility.

Matthew:
Yeah. I know any company does is a bonus, but yeah, sure. Podcast and your own RSS feed. So go make your own success.

Colin:
Indeed. So the other area that we saw split was more in the technical site as well. We saw that newer podcasters tend to pay less attention to both podcast loudness and to bit rates. So what did the numbers look like there, Matthew?

Matthew:
60.2% of podcasters of five years or more have a set in consistent loudness level for the show, that's compared to 31.4% of folks in the zero to five year group. 30% in newer podcasters don't worry about loudness levels at all, compared to 16% of the five years or more group and 43% in your podcasters have no idea what bit rates are only 15.7% of the five year or more group thought the same. So what we're kind of seeing here is people who've been doing it longer know more about how it all works in the back end. Just overly surprising.

Colin:
Indeed, I mean there's an argument there that it might just be experience like once you're in your first year podcast and you're still learning all that stuff and then two, three years in, maybe you start to get a handle on it but I think when you're splitting it five years in, I think that shows actually. Even if you know how to do it, you care or you're capable of learning. You just care less. Partly because so many more tools just do it for you. Like Alitu, we talked about Alitu. Alitu does it for you, it sets loudness, it handles the bit rate stuff for you, you don't have to care. And so many other tools out there do the same thing. So you can concentrate on your message, you can concentrate your voice and not worry about the technical side of things, you don't need to be an audio engineer, so I think that's part of it, certainly.

Matthew:
Cool.

Colin:
All right. That's a lot, I think isn't it?

Matthew:
Yeah. That is the lot. So yeah, you'll find in the survey in its entirety, all the data at podcasthost.com/cares and got nice wee graphics in there and some tweet this buttons, if you're on tweeter as well, you could get involved on that. So.

Colin:
Cool. All right. Let's mention what we're going to do next time round because I'm quite excited about this, actually. We've not done it in a while. We're going to do a good old listener Q and A set of episodes. Aren't we, Matthew?

Matthew:
That's right. Yeah. You can submit questions to us. Say voice questions if you have come in already. So the podcasthost.com/answers is where you'll find that. And it's a speak pipe link. The good thing about doing the voice questions as well. Well, it breaks up just hearing for you and I calling. And also it gives the question answer as well, a wee bit of promotion because they get to mention their podcast and where we could find it and stuff like that. So you might find a couple extra listeners, you might steal some listeners for us.

Colin:
Exactly.

Matthew:
And get some knowledge while at it.

Colin:
So for that matter, let's cut it out, Matthew. Let's not put that offend.

Matthew:
Yeah, let's stop doing it. We'll do a series on NFTs.

Colin:
No, go for that. Please do. We'd love to see some questions. It'd be brilliant to answer some good stuff from yourselves. So if you're out there listening, you have a question about anything related to podcasting. Right from launching your show, anything around how you get that show out there, decisions around what it's going to be about, length, all that kind of stuff. The format of your show, right through to all the later stage stuff like growth and monetization and audio quality and all that. We'd love to get some of your questions. So send them on in what was that, Matthew? Thepodcasthost.com/answers. Is that right?

Matthew:
That is correct. Yes. Slash answers

Colin:
Thepodcasthost.com/answers. Get your voice on there. Mention your show. We'll get out there. We'll get a few thousand listeners these days to this Matthew don't we hopefully get people some good promo.

Colin:
Okay, cool. Right. Just before we go, Matthew I'll mention Alitu again. If you're looking for the easiest way to create your podcast, Alitu, our podcast maker app that does your call recording, soul recording, does all your audio cleanup, got a custom podcast editor in there to all your mistakes and it can publish your podcast as well. So go over to Alitu.com, A-L-I-T-U.com. You get 7 day free trial. You can create a couple episodes in there. See if it works for you. I'd love to have you on there. See if we can save you some time making that podcast and like all these newer podcasters, not care about bit rates and loudness and all that kind stuff. Alitu handles all that for you. All right. Thanks for joining me again, Matthew. Good to have a chat.

Matthew:
You're welcome. Thank you.

Colin:
Always like a good stat and thanks listener for joining us. Great to have you here and we'll see you on the next one. Hopefully. So for some great listener questions, we'll talk to you then.