Passer Vulpes Productions Download Stats - Q3 2020
/Hello Everyone, It’s Lee here! Part of our ethos as podcast makers is maintaining openness and transparency around our productions. As such, I provide detailed breakdowns of the download and listen statistics of each of our podcasts. The work keeps getting bigger as we open more podcast feeds, but this is important to me - So few shows provide detailed breakdowns of their download stats, that releasing this data, even if it’s only for a few shows, can only help to give up and coming podcasters a reasonable benchmark to compare their show’s data with.
Love and Luck
So, let’s start with Love and Luck. As per usual, let’s remind ourselves of Love and Luck’s patterns - It’s an ongoing show (with debut and archive downloads, and occasional announcements), that typically has a weekly schedule (so debut downloads are counted for the first seven days of release), but that is currently on hiatus (and as of September this year, we announced that the hiatus will be indefinite due to the Pandemic. Let’s start, as always, with the monthly totals:
This quarter saw a significant increase in Love and Luck’s downloads from last quarter - from 59,210 to 72,492. This is an increase of 22.43%, a truly monumental increase. The last few quarters, we’ve seen pretty continuous growth in downloads even in our state of hiatus - but that has generally meant increase percentages in single-digits. The drop of our indefinite hiatus announcement doesn’t even come close to explaining this. I have my theories as to why this is the case, but I’ll discuss those a little further down the post, so keep this growth in your thought orbit.
The daily chart shows a very similar pattern to last quarter’s - It’s rather a random walk, with daily totals generally landing somewhere between 500 and 1000 downloads, with a quite impressive leap up from September 20 onwards. This chart separates out announcements, so you can see that the announcement itself doesn’t explain our big leap - but the announcement itself took place during what looks to be a big increase in downloads, and might have helped extend that period of higher downloads. That doesn’t seem surprising to me? I’m sure a lot of people might have not noticed our podcast in their feeds, and the announcement might have reminded those who haven’t finished (and maybe even those who have) that we still existed. Certainly a possibility!
I’ve been collecting client stats for Love and Luck for quite some time, since Podbean makes it very easy to collect them with the rest of the data I collect. I don’t usually post them, because I didn’t have an ability to provide similar data for our other podcasts, but that changed this quarter when I politely asked Pinecast to include that feature (It’s wonderful having a host that will do easy stuff for you when you ask!) So, I thought it would be worth going through this data this quarter.
And it’s certainly worth it this quarter because it looks like a culmination of a trend has finally occured - for some months now, I’ve been watching the share of Apple Podcast listeners slowly decline, as the number of new Spotify listeners kept rising and rising. In October 2019, the two clients reach parity - we had as many Spotify listeners as Apple Podcasts listeners. Since then (with the notable exception of December 2019, when we were on Apple Podcast’s Best of 2019 list), Spotify has consistently been the most popular client, with their lead growing. In September 2020, however, we reached a new milestone - for the first time, Spotify listeners account for the majority of our downloads. In effect, the majority of our “downloads” are more correctly “streams” at this point - an odd place to be as a podcast.
At this point I only have theories as to why this is the case, but I suspect that Spotify’s Podcast integration has been improving, and thus Love and Luck get recommended more and more often. And Love and Luck is actually pretty well-built for Spotify - we have quite short episodes, our demographics consistently trend younger, and we’ve been on Spotify for almost as long as Podcasts have been on Spotify, so I would guess that the data on what our listeners also listen to must be extremely mature by now.
And in case you’re wondering? I’m writing this near the end of October 2020, and it looks like this pattern is only accelerating, it’s not slowing down at all!
The Strata chart can often be a little difficult to read, but it is definitely worth having a closer look at the first few episodes here - even eyeballs can see that our first 7 or so episodes saw a quite impressive increase in numbers, and even the rest of Love and Luck’s episodes, looking at the numbers, did quite well. It seems that we’re seeing a lot of people trying out the show in the last while - our growth seems definitely due to new listeners, rather than people relistening to the show.
At this point, the Milestone chart is mostly just me adding new milestones to see how things look - this month, we add the 3500 line to the chart, and turns out? still extremely consistent shape - Love and Luck’s first few episodes grow quicker, the back end of Season 1 grows slower, but there’s no real change in how that happens at higher milestones. It’s just… super consistent.
With our proportion of Apple Podcast listeners declining, you might think that this would mean that our Apple Podcast charts would fall, but you’d be very wrong - it’s only the proportion that’s dropping, not the actual download figures. As such, we’re still sitting pretty high up in the charts. There is some days where we’re not on the charts, although considering the details around it, I’m not sure if this is actually a drop off the charts, or just days missing in Chartable’s data - it’s kinda hard to tell. The Data shows we’re getting a little less volatile on the US chart - on the days where Love and Luck is on the US charts, we’re averaging position 100, and staying exclusively between positions 75 and 125. (last quarter we average lower at position 109-110, and swung quite a bit more, between positions 51 and 223). Our AU chart performance is still pretty volatile, and was a little worse than last quarter - This quarter we averaged position 85, and swung between positions 4 and 143 (last quarter our average was position 48, with the swing between positions 11 and 141)
The sudden skyrocketing of Spotify’s share of Love and Luck’s listenership, interestingly enough, doesn’t seem to be reflecting overly much in which countries are picking us up - last month I speculated that maybe being on Spotify’s front page meant we were exposed to a larger number of countries, but September’s numbers don’t seem to bear that out - We don’t know whether we got a front page showing or not, but if we did, the proportion of listeners hasn’t shifted in any appreciable fashion compared to other months. Probably the most interesting countries on this quarters top monthly countries are Colombia and Argentina - both of countries had big spikes in listenerships in a given month (Colombia in July, Argentina in September).
Supernatural Sexuality with Dr Seabrooke
Let’s get onto Supernatural Sexuality with Dr Seabrooke! Before we start, a reminder of Seabrooke’s patterns - Seabrooke is an ongoing show (with debut and archive downloads), that is released fortnightly (so debut downloads are counted for the first 14 days of release), which is now on hiatus. Let’s go right into the monthly totals:
This month saw another drop in the quarterly totals for Seabrooke, with 4741 downloads compared to last quarter’s 6265, a decrease of 24.33%. With the last of Seabrooke’s debut completely out of the way, we’re now starting to see what the general discovery rate of the show looks like. It turns out that the the total is quite small compared to Love and Luck’s, with roughly 1500-1600 downloads a month. Now, that’s on a much smaller number of episodes, mind, but it’s still a significant difference - Seabrooke averaged 395 downloads per episode this quarter, compared to Love and Luck’s average of 642 downloads per episode. I considered trying to see what Love and Luck’s average episodes count was back during it’s first year, but it’s not really a reasonable comparison - for the first two year of Love and Luck’s life, there was only 6 weeks where there wasn’t a new episode being released - if Love and Luck had had a lengthy hiatus like Seabrooke at that point, it might well have looked similar to this, but we know that consistent episode release improves discovery, so we can’t really make that comparison here.
With no big spikes in downloads, we see a similar pattern to Love and Luck’s downloads - a pretty random walk of daily downloads (with 35-70 being the where most days seem to land). One thing I did find interesting, looking at the figures, is how often a low daily total would herald a big increase the next day - something tells me this is part of that random walk, and a consequence of being a relatively short show that people might be quite happy to download the entirety of at once, but alas, the data I have doesn’t really let me test that hypothesis.
Getting into the Strata chart, this month there’s not a lot new here - Episode 1 continue to be the winner on downloads, followed by Episode 12. We can see the slow drop off in downloads across the show (quite common on all our shows - not everyone discovering the show will listen through the entirety of it), but this mostly just confirms a trend rather than shows any new, exciting data. Still, I’ve always loved the strata chart - it’s a nice way of seeing the way downloads sort of stack up against each other.
With our brand new data around Clients, we can take a look at what people are listening to Seabrooke with… and it’s entirely different from Love and Luck. Interestingly, Podcast Addict made up a substantial amount of our early months, and Apple Podcasts has never really been a very large proportion of our listenership. It seems like Spotify’s dominance isn’t quite as assured for Seabrooke - while the proportion was increasing, September has seen a sudden dip, thanks to Apple and a much larger number of smaller clients making up the “Other” category. Interestingly, Seabrooke’s YouTube listenership stayed relatively consistent compared to Love and Luck - Youtube has increasingly become a smaller and smaller proportion of listnerships there, but it continue to be a relatively large chunk of listeners for Seabrooke.
So, let’s take a look at Milestones, and one pretty interesting thing to see here is that Episodes 11 and 12 seem to be pulling a lot more weight comparative to other later episodes. This isn’t entirely surprising - we saw a big spike in people discovering the podcast right at the end of our season - and big spike events tend to just add to totals - if everything increases at the same rate, it makes sense that episodes that had a push at any point would get to each milestone quicker - it’s like adding a constant to an equation.
One thing that Seabrooke makes really obvious is that the Apple Podcast charts tend to reward big backlogs - which does show that apple podcast play time seems to still be relevant at some level to how podcasts chart. It does seem that Seabrooke’s charts are rather all over the place in the US charts - this month, Seabrooke charted 57.60% of the quarter, averaging a position of 181.2 during it’s time on the chart, with the spread being between positions 122 and 245, a solid decrease on last month (last month: 67.03% occupancy, average position 181.2, spread between positions 42 and 244). The AU charts have generally been much more consistent between the quarters, with an occupancy of 92.39%, an average position of 105.3, and a spread between positions 37 and 259, compared to last quarter’s occupancy of 75.82%, an average position of 109.6, spread between positions 31 and 200.
On to the country stats, and as we’re starting to see lower numbers, we start to see that it doesn’t take that many people to bump a country up to the top 10 list. As an example: Russia had very good number in August by the percentages, but in raw figures that’s just 74 downloads. That represents around 8-10 people downloading the show. The most interesting country showing up here is Ghana (not normally represented in podcast country top 10s!), but that’s representing 20 downloads all up, all in September - so, 2-4 people all up.
Nym’s Nebulous Notions
Okay, let’s move along to Nym’s Nebulous Notions! To recap the patterns here, Nym is a completed show, that was released all at once (so no debut/archive distinction). Let’s start with the monthly totals:
Nym’s downloads continue to drop from last quarter, from 1634 to 1401 downloads (a 14.26% reduction). August was the odd one out with a fairly hefty lift in downloads, but with no real promotion, it seems pretty random at this point.
The daily charts show… well, not much, really. We see that August’s big lift was due mostly in the front half of the month, but the figures are very volatile - some days are single-digits, some as high as 50+, but not a lot of clear patterns in terms of when people are finding the show.
The Strata chart for Nym, again, doesn’t show much new data - Episodes 1 and 12 are the ones with the largest number of downloads (both for clear reasons), with the rest of the episodes following an obvious trajectory down. No new surprises, no episodes clearly showing biased episode counts - pretty clear continuation of previous trends.
Now, it was about the time I started looking at Nym’s client data that I discovered that the client data on Pinecast only goes back a year. Seabrooke’s a year old, so that’s fine, but Nym’s quite a bit older, so we only have a year’s worth of data to go through. But, it’s enough to see some interesting patterns - it seems that Nym is also seeing a sudden increase in Spotify’s share of listeners. Unlike Love and Luck, this seems to be borne out both in percentage and figures - September showed both a reduction in Apple Podcasts listeners, and a big jump in Spotify listeners. Why this is isn’t really apparent - I’ll be interested to see if this pattern continues next quarter.
Probably the most interesting part of the charting chart is that unlike our other shows, Nym seems not to be doing better in the AU charts than the US charts. While it’s in the charts, the position is slightly better, but it’s in the charts a similar amount of time. For the US charts, Nym occupied the charts 57.61% of the quarter, at an average position of 187.09 (quite near to the bottom of the chart), spread between positions 85 and 250 (comparable to last quarter’s occupancy of 59.34%, at an average position of 156.74, spread between positions 74 and 247. In the AU charts, Nym occupied the charts 56.52% of the quarter, at an average positions of 109.78, spread between positions 20 and 194 (a marked improvement on last quarter’s occupancy of 12.09%, at an average positions of 125.81, spread between positions 99 and 146).
Once again, that law of small numbers bring a lot of interesting variation to our country figures. Russia, Namibia and Hong Kong turn up at various points on the top 10s, all on figures indicating a single listener going through the show. One thing I do find interesting at this point is that it seems like US figures are pretty consistent, and thus the lower the overall download totals, the greater the percentage the US takes up in first place. It’s quite amazingly consistent, all things considered.
Passer Vulpes Presents
And now on to Passer Vulpes Presents!. To remind people of the patterns for this show, PVP is an ongoing show with an irregular schedule - the feed is intended to be a miscellanea feed for any shorts or projects we need a home for. I decided to set the debut time to one week, just to make sure that no two episodes shared a debut period (and because honestly, any timeframe was going to be pretty arbitrary). Let’s go to the monthlies:
This month the figures continue to be very low and mostly consistent with last month’s figures. The download total was 74, compared to last quarter’s 71, although the spread between the months was much more consistent compared to last quarter. No odd surprises in the figures here.
With such low figures, the country data is very all over the place - July and August saw Poland take up very large proportions of the total figures, with the raw numbers being 5 and 10 - which shows how such low figures really bring out the volatility in the data.
Floodlight Viscera
And finally, we move on to Floodlight Viscera! A reminder of FLV’s patterns: Floodlight Viscera is an ongoing podcast with a monthly schedule (so, we count the first 30 days of release as debut), but we do absolutely no promotion for the FLV feed, as it’s effectively an accessiblity option for the zine itself.
FLV’s totals here look very all over the place - July had single digits, while August and September are enormous months, just dwarfing previous months totals entirely. The reasons for these are pretty simple - July didn’t have a zine release (and we’ve seen previously that a lack of release significantly drops the totals that month), which August had effectively three episodes released that month - two regular episodes and a bonus episode combining the two. This seems to have generated some interest from others with two people each month looking into the archives as a result (yep - that massive increase is from two people exploring the whole archive!).
The country data here shows a pretty clear trend that our 4 new listeners all happened to be in the United States, which has shrunk every other country’s small contributions to the total! Once again, a surprise appearance from Colombia on the list (representing two downloads) - whoever our fan is in Colombia, I hope you’re enjoying our shows!
And that’s it for this quarter! I hope you’ve gotten something out of our stats post this quarter, and remember that if you have questions about your own data, or just want to talk stats and theory, please feel free to chat to me on twitter, I’m @passerkirbius. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next quarter!