What is a good number of podcast downloads?

There are a LOT of podcasts out there. Around 2 million to be exact. So how is your show going in the mix of them all?

In this episode, I talk about how many downloads are a “good” amount of downloads and why it’s not necessarily the only metric you should be looking at.
I share some great resources you can use to see where your show is sitting on a global scale and how to check your podcast stats to track the growth of your show.

As you’ll see from the stats that Blubrry collates once a month, to be in the top 50% of podcasts as far as downloads go, isn’t a huge number to reach.

Although it’s fantastic to strive for a lot of downloads, there are also factors that play into the success of a show and so it’s always worth exploring what the purpose of your podcast is, and whether it is serving that purpose for you and your audience.

Happy Podcasting!

Transcript:

00:00
Welcome to Pump Up Your Pod Welcome back to Pump Up Your Pod with me, Brianna from Bamby Media.

Today I want to run through how many downloads are a good amount of downloads? So could be a bit of a loaded question because you know, however many downloads you have is probably okay, it depends on other metrics more than perhaps anything else. But you know, for the purpose of this, let's have a look at them. So as I like to do, I like to go to my trusty friends here at Buzzsprout. And look at their platform stats. Buzzsprout is a podcasting host. It is my favourite podcast host. And they do a whole bunch of stats like every month to show you how things are travelling, like for everyone that's on Buzzsprout how things are going, how people are listening, all sorts of stuff, so I like to check it out.

Now the thing I'm focusing on here today is this one episode downloads, first seven days. So how many downloads episode gets within seven days. If we have a look at these, we'll go from the bottom first, top 50% is 28 downloads per episode, top 25% 78 downloads, top 10% 264 downloads, top 5% 629 downloads, and top 1% of podcasts get over 3647 downloads per episode within seven days. So you can see from there that you don't have to be getting a heap of downloads to be considered in the top 50% 20. app downloads is not a huge amount of downloads. But it just goes to show how many podcasts there must be in the world.

And in this case on Buzzsprout. So you can see here, there are 105,000 active podcasts on Buzzsprout. Within that month, there was 171,108 actual episodes, and 81 million downloads for everything that's on Buzzsprout within that month. So that's really cool to know that you don't have to have a lot of downloads to be considered doing pretty well as far as the download numbers go. The other thing to check is to like for your personal podcast, you can go to this site called listen notes. And I just did a search before for the School of Greatness. And what you can do is it shows you the Listen score for a podcast and the global ranking of that podcast.

Now these are based on statistics and things that listen note specifically has, you know, put together, but it gives you a really good idea as to how your sits in relation to other podcasts. So the higher you can get in the Listen score to 100, the better. And then the global ranking obviously is just a percentage. So for the School of Greatness, for example, for current right now, as of June 11 2021. The listeners score for the School of Greatness is 79. And the global rank is point zero 1%. So that is an extremely popular show. This is a really good page to just go and check out because it just gives you heaps of different things to look at. And it's great previous episodes, all the stuffs there for each podcast. It's like a podcast search engine almost.

03:39
It's great. So we could do another search. It's really easy to search on Listen notes. If we did a search for let's say Joe Rogan, we know that Joe Rogan has a very popular podcast. Let's see what listen notes has to say about Joe Rogan. Okay, so Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan experience, here's listen score is 98. So man, that's right out there. And then the global rank is the same as the School of Greatness, which is point 1%. So I would advise go to this site for your own podcast, type it in and see where you sit. And then you can track that over time and just see whether these scores go up. And then you'll be able to track that with your podcast stats, as well with your downloads and see how the growth is going. So it's a really, really good feature. Listen notes is great for that. But other thing that's great about listening notes is you know, you can embed an actual player if your podcast host didn't have a player or if you'd like that one better. And you can search for particular episodes. If you're looking for something in particular, you can do that there. So it's really good.

So just to recap, if you're getting over like 30 downloads per episode, you're actually doing really well compared to everything else that's out there. There are currently 105,000 537 active podcasts on Buzzsprout. This is just bread sprout. So there's heaps of other podcast hosts out there, boss, Brad's only one of them. So we've got things like Libsyn, blueberry, anchor wiska, pod bean heaps of them, right. So the amount of actual podcasts that are in the world, on all these different hosts is about, I think at last count it was it was getting close to 2 million, like it was 1.7 million podcasts, like in total, but only like a million of them or something was actually active podcasts. The rest of them were just, you know, people that had put some episodes up, and they're still technically there, but they're not active, like people aren't putting new episodes out. So it's really good to know that, yeah, you can do pretty well or could be considered to be doing pretty well, if you're getting around 30 downloads or more.

And then go to the Listen notes as well to track and have a look at how yours is going and track these things over time. I find it super interesting to do that myself. So definitely have a look at those things. And yeah, just know that it isn't all about download numbers. If you're in a small niche, your download numbers are going to be smaller than perhaps someone who's in a bigger niche. Because there's not as many people interested in the thing that you're talking about, let's say for example, podcasting. So I wouldn't think that Pump Up Your Pod, the podcast, would get as many downloads as someone that maybe has a Marketing Podcast where that's much more broad, that kind of thing. If they're targeting it properly, and they're doing their marketing properly for the show, I would expect them to get more downloads, then my show because my show is super specialised.

So don't always just look at your numbers and go, Oh, my numbers aren't very good. What are the other things that your show is doing? As in people reaching out to you saying they love it? Is it converting into some sort of sales for you, as well? Some other way, like other metrics that you can go, Okay, well, I might not be getting as many download numbers, but I am getting x y z.

So I know that my podcast is doing well. Yeah, there you go. So that's my wrap up on podcast statistics, how many downloads is a good amount of downloads, and we will certainly go into how to get more and that sort of thing in other episodes, but for now, I just wanted to show you through what it actually looks like as far as how many downloads you get within seven days. If you would like any other information, go to Bamby media.com. All our other episodes are in there in the slash podcast area. And if you want to book any consults, we have a variety of consults. All the information is there. And yeah, go and have a browse around. I hope you have a good day and thanks for listening.