Passer Vulpes Productions Stats: August 2019

Hello Everyone, It’s Lee here! Part of our ethos as podcast makers is maintaining openness and transparency around our productions. As such, Each month I’ll be providing detailed breakdowns of the download and listen statistics of each of our podcasts. I’ll discuss some of the trends that I see, what interesting items have happened that might explain those trends, and give some general information on what I’ve seen from our podcast stats.

Love and Luck

This month, Love and Luck managed 24765 downloads - a significant drop on last month’s total of 27561, but very much in line with our usual pattern of downloads - 23000-25000 a month appears to be our base state for downloads, assuming no other big changes occur. Let’s look at the Debut/Archive divide:

Our division between Debut and Archive episodes remained remarkably consistent to last month’s totals:

Debut: 6368 (25.71% of total) (Up 0.18pts)
Archive: 17370 (70.14% of total) (Up 0.40pts)
Announce: 1027 (4.15% of total) (down 0.58pts)

As you can see, the percentages are within 0.5 percentage points from last month’s totals - even with the slight reduction in the actual figures, it’s very consistent.

In fact, the figures in general show a consistency that doesn’t happen often - Usually, as people discover and pick up the show, our figures tend to vary quite a bit month-to-month. In some ways, this isn’t much of a surprise - we haven’t done a great deal of marketing for the show for a while, as me and Erin focus on our own stuff, so we’re not getting a great deal of big boosts like we may have previously (last month being an exception thanks to our showing on the BBC).

Our next chart is the milestone chart. Now, this doesn’t change a great deal, seeing as once the milestone’s reached, that’s about it. But on the end of the graph, again, we see a remarkable amount of consistency in our figures here - As we reach the end of the season, our shows are performing pretty much the same each run. Which is a little interesting, considering the archive downloads would indicate more growth than that - we’re still getting a huge number of people starting the show, so you’d think the milestone numbers would fall as we get more people listening episode-to-episode. This is something I’ll probably keep looking at in the next few months, as Season 2 winds down and we get a more nuanced look at how the show grows without new episodes in the mix.

Next up, we’re updating the Strata chart, which tells a story that seems a little off compared to the milestone totals - we can see that, for the episodes at the end, there’s clear growth in the more recent downloads - more people are going through and discovering the show, and more people are downloading the newest episodes. Note, the tapering off of downloads at the end isn’t evidence of anything - the most recent episodes, just by dint of being new, won’t have had their full download total yet. This is a weird discontinuity in the data that will probably only become clear in the next few months (after all, the milestone totals at the higher levels don’t come in for over a month!)

So last month, we mentioned that Apple Podcasts had created new Fiction categories, that of course we jumped onto as quick as we could! Chartable’s data wasn’t quite as fast as we were, so this was the first month we had data on the new chart. One detail that can be seen very clearly is that the number are much smaller in the new category. I think this chart tells a story more about the new charts than of our podcast - you can see the big drop around the 8th and 9th of August in the US charts when a bunch of new shows joined the category, along with that slow decline as shows drip feed into the new category. I don’t expect this to the be last time we see a jump like this, so we’ll continue to monitor this for the next month and see where things land.

Another interesting bit of data - The AU chart data comes in just as the big drop happens - but there’s no drop in the AU chart data. This indicates to me that our high status on the AU charts is probably not a function of the smaller category - this is probably an accurate representation of our popularity on that chart.

In terms of the Country stats, the United Kingdom continues to take over from Australia in the #2 spot, thanks to our BBC appearance, although I also predict that this will be short-lived - even now, the numbers are close to level, so I don’t doubt that they’ll revert to previous form by next month. To noone’s surprise, the Grand total figures didn’t move an inch - even with the larger UK totals, there’s enough downloads now that it would require massive or long-term shifts to start moving those figures.

Nym’s Nebulous Notions

As we’ve mentioned previously, Nym’s quite the different data set, so remember - we don’t distinguish Debut from Archive, and the there’s no heartbeat like Love and Luck. With that said, let’s get into this month’s figures:

August’s download total continues to drop vs previous months: 1024 downloads for August, compared to 1518 for July. That’s not nearly as big a drop as June to July, I look forward to seeing next month’s data to see if this decay continues.

The daily chart looks a lot more even, now that we’re not looking at the big launch bump, but compared to Love and Luck’s archive downloads, it’s still remarkably variable at it’s scale. There are some days where the downloads are in single figures, and some days where the downloads are nearly triple-figures! One thing, I think, that adds to this variability is due to the smaller number of episodes - with only 12, the spread of downloads is only going through maybe a few days, rather than Love and Luck, which I’m sure may take people a lot longer to get through the backlog. We’ll see if this variability does continue over the next few months!

The Strata chart confirms our comments from last month - Episode 1 continues to be the episode with the most downloads, Episode 5 continues to be the clear “If you’re here, you’re with us to the end” episode, and Episode 12 continue to be that weird auto-download artifact. Not much more that needs to be said on this one.

The Country breakdown is actually quite similar to the breakdown for Love and Luck in many ways, with the big English-speaking countries at the top (US, Australia, Canada and the UK) followed by New Zealand and the Phillipines (also two English-speaking countries), with Germany and Sweden coming next, and Brazil and France in the rear. Should we get any big spikes, I expect this data will vary wildly, considering how early days it is for the show’s download figures! What I do not expect, is for the US to be knocked off the top of the chart - It does seem to be true that the US is just an enormous market, especially for audio fiction!

So, for some reason, Nym took quite a bit longer than expected to make the jump from the Performing Arts chart to the Science Fiction chart - we didn’t actually get to see it jump until around the 26th, so I can’t make a lot of claims as to the Science Fiction Data, considering how little we have of it.

The last of the Performing Arts data is a little interesting to look at - It’s interesting that the Australian charts are a lot more stable than the US charts (those spikes keep upping the figures, while the Australian numbers keep declining). Another interesting feature is that once the two podcasts hit the Science Fiction category, they stopped declining pretty much immediately. Now, I’m not certain this is a real pattern yet, but if it holds, it likely means that the Science Fiction category means a lot better discovery than Performing Arts, which is pretty obvious when you think about it? We’ll see how the figures go from here, I think.

Floodlight Viscera

So, as we mentioned last Month, Floodlight Viscera is again, a different set of data than the above. It’s incredibly small, gets no marketing, and is designed to be a no-stress creative outlet for Erin. It’s downloads are sufficiently small that it makes no sense to give daily downloads, so let’s look at the monthly totals instead:

Probably the big story here is last month had a quite impressive jump in archive downloads - it seems that at least a few people must have see last month’s post and decided to check it out! Good on you! As a result, there’s a slight uptick in debut listens as well, although again, nothing particularly big. It probably says something that a download figure of 50-60 is a marked change in FLV’s usual download totals!

And the final chart is the last 6 month download figures. Now, there’s actually some interesting shifts here - for one thing, it appears that one of our listeners raiding the archives is clearly from France, as France is in the number 2 spot all of a sudden. Apart from that, it’s pretty similar to last month, with US out in front, Australia still taking up a good deal more downloads (nearly as much as our french listener), and a smattering of tiny downloads elsewhere.

And that’s it for all our shows! If you have any questions, you’re more than welcome to hit me up on twitter, I’m @passerkirbius, I’m always happy to chat stats!