Passer Vulpes Productions Download Stats - Q4 2019
/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.
Now, this has fallen a little by the wayside in recent months, because, among other things, I have been working hard at editing an audio fiction podcast, so I haven’t had the time I usually have. Of course, the fact that we have four podcasts running at this point has also significantly contributed to the workload! Getting these stats collated and charted is a lot of work (and I understand why noone else goes to quite the crazy lengths that I do!).
What I will probably be doing from here on in is posting these at quarterly intervals, rather than monthly - With everything we’re running I’m not sure I have the capacity to throw these out every month. Still, a commitment is a commitment, so let’s get into the details of the last quarter!
Love and Luck
This quarter, my stats database for Love and Luck hit a new milestone - it officially broke Google Sheets! There’s now so much data that my custom functions can’t run, so a goodly amount of preparation for this round of stats was migrating that data over to Excel. Turns out, yes, there are some levels of data that you still can’t do with Google Sheets, whoda thunk it?
Anyway, Because we’re running to a quarterly set, we’ll show this week’s download totals in table form:
| Month | Downloads |
|---|---|
| Oct-2019 | 13259 |
| Nov-2019 | 15267 |
| Dec-2019 | 24938 |
So, some interesting notes here - I mentioned in the last Stats post that our statistics tended to hang around 23000-25000 downloads a month - but that’s assuming we have new content, which we haven’t had for this quarter at all. October and November shows a reduced number of downloads, but not as much as you’d expect considering our “Debut” figures tend to hang around 6000-7000. It seems we’re seeing a significant rise in people going through our back catalog.
December gets it’s own paragraph, of course, because something very big and important happened in December, that we’ll look at the effects of throughout this post - Love and Luck was selected as Apple Podcasts’ #1 fiction podcast in their best of 2019 list. This, as you might imagine, has generated quite a bit of interest in our podcast (we even got into mainstream papers in Australia!) and caused a quite significant increase in our figures in Australia (a bit more about this later). Let’s look at the daily downloads and see if you can spot the day the Apple Podcasts list went up:
Now, in this section, we’d typically throw some details regarding our Debut vs Archive downloads, but as you have probably noticed by now, Love and Luck is on hiatus, and thus there are no debut downloads at all! It’s interesting that a big enough boost in a single country was enough to boost us back to mid-season download figures, even without new content.
I’m mostly including this because we finally have the full chart - Every single episode has now surpassed 2000 downloads (and in many cases, far, far more). Probably the most interesting components of this section is that, while the first 1500 downloads kept getting faster and faster, getting to 2000 doesn’t seem to have hit a similar pattern at all. Some episodes go up, some go down, but after episode 70 or so, there’s no real velocity there at all. My guess, and it’s only a guess here, is that if you’re one of the many people going through our archives, getting right to the end takes some work - and if we didn’t hit the milestone during the initial debut week, the time it takes for whoever is currently catching up to get to the last few episodes is quite variable - there’s no real rush if you aren’t following week to week - the rest of the episodes are still going to be there.
Whoo boy, am I glad that this chart is going to be compressing shortly! For me, probably the most interesting part of this chart is just looking at the latest month - Since a bunch of people have discovered the podcast in December, we can see the super-clear patterns in what gets downloaded first. The most interesting segment to me, is that probably more people are choosing to start their Love and Luck experience at the start of Season 2, than they are at the start of Season 1 - but those who start at Season 1 are making a lot more progress getting through the show. So, you know, start at the start people!
Once again, the big story this chart shows is really the immediate (and sustained) lift in our Apple Podcast rankings in Australia, that has literally no correlation in the US charts. Love and Luck has always charted particularly well in Australia, but we literally topped the chart for nearly a week (and stayed pretty close by the top for another two weeks. However, with nothing big happening in the US, our chart position has continued to wander in the 50-200 range.
So, with the three monthly charts, the big takeaway is two charts that are extremely similar - and then there’s December where, for the first time since October 2018, Australia has actually managed to secure more downloads than the United States. By a significant margin. Will this continue through? I honestly don’t think so - The US truly is the powerhouse in Audio Fiction audiences, I’ll be extremely surprised if we see this trend continue through into the next quarter of downloads.
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:
| Month | Downloads |
|---|---|
| Oct | 552 |
| Nov | 1651 |
| Dec | 1847 |
So, let’s look at the elephant in the room - November shows a sudden tremendous increase in downloads, and then December we get another spike. What’s going on? Well, in November (November 6 to be exact), we put an announcement on the Love and Luck feed announcing both Nym and Seabrooke. As you can see, November 6, like clockwork, big spike in downloads. This, by the by, is why you really should cross-promote your shows on your feeds - There’s always going to be people who only look at your feed, and those people are likely to be very interested in your other shows!
So, that explains November, what about December? Well, in December, Nym’s Nebulous Notions was highlighted on Radio Drama Revival, and a week later, Erin and myself were interview guests on the show. Both episode dates showed particularly big download spikes, which lead to a very good month for Nym - actually the best we’ve had since Nym’s launch back in June.
Now, here’s an interesting note on the December episode distribution. Nym’s showcase on Radio Drama Revival included the first three episodes - and surprise surprise, we can see there is actually a distinct drop off in Episodes 2 & 3 (Considering more than just the RDR audience will come looking, it’s not surprising that Episode 1 doesn’t quite follow the same pattern. From Episode 4 onwards, there’s practically no drop off getting to Episode 12, which, again, makes sense - If you like the first three episodes, you’re probably going to want to listen to all the rest.
Nym’s Apple Podcast chart rankings unfortunately don’t tell much more of a story than the download charts preceding it. Unlike Love and Luck, Nym doesn’t generally stay in the charts, because with only 12 episodes, it can’t really sustain any interest it receives with more downloads. With that said, one interesting thing to note is that, at least in the US, the boosts that Nym has received in November and December have been just enough to keep Nym from leaving the charts, keeping it in the charts every day for over two months - a record for the podcast.
Finally we have the country data. The data itself doesn’t tell much of a story, but it is interesting to see that during December, Australia got kicked out of it’s normally solid #2 spot, with both Canada and the UK managing just a few more downloads than usual. Other than this, there’s not really much changing in terms of country proportions.
Supernatural Sexuality with Dr Seabrooke
Everyone, please welcome the new entrant to the Stats page! Supernatural Sexuality with Dr Seabrooke launched in October (with a trailer in September), and because we’re like this, Seabrooke has a different release schedule to all our other podcasts! Seabrooke released once a fortnight (or every two weeks for those outside the Commonwealth) for 12 episodes, so roughly a half-year season. This means that we can definitely use our debut/archive distinction with this show, and the good news is, you all get to see the show right at launch and watch it grow!
So, let’s look at the figures for the month first up:
| Date | Archive | Debut | Grand Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep-2019 | 74 | 74 | |
| Oct-2019 | 191 | 315 | 506 |
| Nov-2019 | 1027 | 1076 | 2103 |
| Dec-2019 | 875 | 1060 | 1935 |
So, let’s look at those debut/archive numbers. If you’ve been following our posts, you’ll probably remember that Love and Luck’s split of debut to archive is around 25% debut to around 75% archive, and that this was remarkably consistent each month. Seabrooke seems to be managing a more even split - debut downloads hover between 35% and 50% each month. My suspicion here is that firstly, there are far fewer episodes for people to download, and secondly, because we’re looking at near-launch figures, for much of the time, there wasn’t really much archives to listen to. We’ll see how the next quarter’s figures measure up.
Another thing to note is the sudden jump in November, which, if you’ll recall from Nym, was primarily due to us dropping the trailer for the show on the Love and Luck feed. There’s also the fact that November benefited from the schedule somewhat - Episode 2 dropped October 31, which meant that much of that episode’s downloads landed in November. December surprisingly mostly keeps up, with downloads in a very similar ball park, despite only having two episodes launching that month.
Jumping to the Strata chart, and man, don’t these things look so clean when you first start a podcast? At this point, the chart tells a similar story to the daily chart. Unsurprisingly Episode 1 is significantly more downloaded than the rest, with a pretty quiet curve through to the end, which is natural for an episodic show (not everyone downloads at the same time!). It is probably worth keeping an eye on this next quarter - the strata charts for both shows, I think, will definitely show differences, even though they’re both 12 episode shows.
Next up comes Seabrooke’s chart performance, A really interesting thing to note here is how Seabrooke is staying in the Australian charts most days - there are breaks, but they’re pretty short. However, breaking into the US charts seems to be very, very difficult for the show. It seems that even with relatively good downloads each episode, even in the US, those downloads don’t seem to be occurring on Apple devices. Which, just quietly, does reveal a particular flaw on relying on these charts, but is fascinating in it’s own way, since Love and Luck listeners definitely use Apple devices plenty.
Finally, we come to the Country data, and the US, it seems, has pretty quickly cemented it’s usual position as the 100 pound gorilla in the download stakes, followed by Australia, Canada and the UK, with a smattering of countries at the end. October shows a slightly make up, but as we saw, November and December have the bigger numbers, which put the charts into the familiar shape we see. It’s actually a bit impressive just how similar the Love and Luck and Seabrooke Country charts are - is this specifically to do with us, or does this say something about the Audio Fiction market that’s worth saying? Not sure yet, but I’m definitely going to be looking at this data further.
Floodlight Viscera
So, on to Floodlight Viscera. As a reminder, this show is a very 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:
Now, probably the biggest thing worth noting is that the archive figures are dramatically variable from month to month, while the debut data remains very consistent. Now, FLV has quite a large back catalog - about 40 episodes at this point, so anyone discovering the show and going through the archives naturally shows up here. It’s worth noting, actually, that these archive bumps actually reflect only 1-2 people going through the archive each month - that’s how tiny this podcast is.
Onto the country data (the podcast is so small there is no charting data for it), what’s probably most remarkable about this data is that you can actually see some significant variation each month. Also, oddly enough, there is no other category on any of the month charts - There’s so few people here that only 7-8 countries are represented each month. Which countries that is changes (there are apparently a couple of french people in the audience, to which I say merci!), which shows up in the grand total chart, but the activity is so low, you’re actually seeing the whole data set here.
And that’s it for all our shows for the last quarter! It took nearly a month of work, but it’s done! 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!