Passer Vulpes Productions Download Stats - Q1 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. So, enough preamble, let’s get into it!
Love and Luck
Okay, let’s get into the quarterly totals first:
| Month | Downloads |
|---|---|
| January 2020 | 21170 |
| February 2020 | 16168 |
| March 2020 | 20496 |
We see that our download figures are a bit higher than last quarter’s - last quarter was 53464 downloads, this month is 57834, an increase of about 8.17%. We can see that January was still feeling the impact of our inclusion on the Apple Podcasts Best of 2019 list, February we see that fall out of the system, and March we see the stats bump right back up again, partially as a result of us dropping the Quarantine Episode, which we’ll discuss a little more below, and probably at least partially a result of the COVID-19 Lockdown, as people try and find things to make them feel a bit better.
As mentioned, this month we released a new episode of Love and Luck, our Quarantine Special, which bumped our stats up for March. This bumped up March’s figures significantly - just in the 5 days it was available in March, it gathered 2009 downloads - which is definitely the fastest any episode has hit 2000, apart from Episode 69! Other than this, what this chart most reveals is that in good months, it’s more about getting consistently good downloads each day, in the leaner months, the downloads are usually still good each day, but are usually less consistently so, and jump around a bit more. Which is something interesting to note, and something that would usually just be invisible under the usual release heartbeat.
We’d mostly completed this download milestone chart last quarter, this quarter I’ve added a 2500 download line to see if that shows any particular pattern there. Turns out? Not so much - the line pattern is nearly shot-for-shot matching the 2000 line. Although, interestingly, the Quarantine Special is doing significantly better significantly faster than Episode 100 (which I’d expect just based on logic - more people will have hit the end of the show and will want to check out the new content). I pulled a little data from April just to finish the 2500 line for Episode 101 - it hit 2500 episodes in 16 days, which is not a bad effort.
It’s a new year, thus I’ve consolidated 2019’s data back into a single colour on the strata chart, and that alone has shown a few interesting patterns - the sheer number of people trying out the show in 2019 just pales in comparison to previous years. 2019 didn’t quite double 2018, but it did get very close. It did well over double if every episode is taken into account - 287827 vs 127360, but of course, there were more episodes to download in 2019, so that’s not actually that surprising.
One particularly weird anomaly - Episode 13 (White Lillies) was exceptionally close the the most downloaded episode in February - 650 vs Episode 1’s 664, compared to an expected 180-170, judging by the surrounding episodes. I honestly have no clue as to why this might be the case, and I don’t have data granular enough to start to figure out why. Either someone’s showcased this episode somewhere and it’s got some real traction, or someone’s listening to this episode over and over (which I can’t blame them for, it’s a pretty good episode!)
So, onto the Apple Podcast Chart… chart, and what we’re really seeing here is the slow decline as December’s fun drops off in the AU charts, and the previous pattern of a weekly bump around Sunday-Monday, and a slow drop back down - at least until the middle of march, where all of a sudden we’re back in the top 10. This was before the Quarantine Special dropped, so... I think more likely that as COVID starts picking up, people start downloading the show, at least in Australia. The pattern in the US doesn’t show the same wind down from December (since that boost was purely in Australia), but the number show that our US chart figures jump up at pretty much the same time they jump up in Australia, which I think does give evidence that this bump is probably more widespread than these two countries (and thus is probably related to *waves crazily at the world*.
Last set of charts is the Country Charts, no particular surprises to talk about this quarter - Australia performed above average in January and March, although in February was looking roughly on average form. The US continues to account for over 50% of downloads (although not much more than that), and the top 5 continue to be the US, Australia, Canada, the UK and Germany in varying places (Although New Zealand did peak into the Top 5 in January briefly!).
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:
| Date | Downloads |
|---|---|
| January 2020 | 1142 |
| February 2020 | 820 |
| March 2020 | 803 |
So, remember when I mentioned earlier that good months tended to show up as good consistency-wise? We see that distinction here, too - In January, Nym is still coming down from it’s showcasing on Radio Drama Revival in November, although at a lesser rate than previously. Once we hit February and March, it looks like that bump has finally worked it’s way out of the system - but we’ve been left with a higher baseline. Previously, 500 downloads a months was pretty average, now around 800 a month seems to be the base rate. We’ll see if this continues to track down the road.
This quarter’s strata chart pretty much shows the same details as previous - Episodes 1 and 12 are the two that continue to get the most downloads (from people’s podcatchers auto-downloading the most recent episode, and people starting from the beginning), with all the other episodes roughly similar in downloads. Nice to see the details, but overall nothing to see here.
So, the previous quarter’s Charting chart (god, there has to be a better way of saying that…) once again shows that really interesting near-weekly bounce effect in the US chart, but it turns out that there’s so few Australian downloads that Nym is barely in the AU charts, apart from a herculean effort in early february, that vanished about as quickly as it appeared.
The Country charts this month don’t have a great deal of surprises in store, although good on you Canada for taking second place in January! Good work! Although probably the most interesting part of these charts is that Nym is generally sticking at around 75% US audience this quarter apart from March. It’s worth noting that the actual number of US downloads is surprisingly consistent though - the change is just due to more downloads from other countries.
Supernatural Sexuality with Dr Seabrooke
Welp, we’ve come to the end of the season for Seabrooke! We get to take a look at how the back half of the season performed compared to the front half, and our data cuts off pretty much at the end of Season 1’s debut period. Before we start, let’s get acquainted with Seabrooke’s patterns - It’s an ongoing show (with debut and archive downloads), that has a fortnightly release schedule (so debut downloads are counted for the first 14 days of an episode’s release). Let’s have a look at the figures for this quarter first up:
| Date | Downloads |
|---|---|
| January 2020 | 3733 |
| February 2020 | 3539 |
| March 2020 | 7529 |
Let’s start on the basic comparisons: This quarter’s total downloads totalled 14801 downloads, which absolutely blasts the last quarter’s figures (4631) completely out of the water. This is something that I’d obviously expect - We release more episodes, of course you’re going to get more downloads, but this is a lift of 300%, and is representing some serious growth. And then in March we see an absolute explosion of downloads, and while you might think this is a result of the season ending (there are a lot of people who won’t start a show unless the season’s finished), we can see below that the peak actually starts a little before the season finale:
The Debut chart very clearly shows that huge jump in March’s figures - before that point there’s not a lot of variance fortnight to fortnight. It turns out I can actually isolate the cause for this jump - Seabrooke got a shoutout from a quite popular Tumblr, which directed a very significant number of people our way. This ultimately also bumped up the debut figures for that month, although again, season finales tend to see a bump generally, and it’s rather hard to separate the two influences with the data I have access to.
Man, I love when the strata charts are so much simpler! The chart here reflects pretty well compared to the Love and Luck chart, in that we’re getting a pretty good conversion from people listening to Episode 1 to the rest of the show. We see that usual slow decrease from the start of the season to the finish, although it’s a little wobbly by the end of the season - Episode 11, oddly, is a bit higher than the episodes around it, I would guess due to the new listeners from Tumblr jumping in when that episode was the latest episode.
Back to the *sigh* Charting chart, and unlike Love and Luck which stays pretty much perpetually in the AU charts, Seabrooke actually still falls in and out of the AU chart. I find it interesting that, apart from the absences on the AU chart, The US and AU charts actually follow each other to a much bigger degree than Love and Luck or Nym does. This tells me that the discovery for Seabrooke is not as geographically connected as our other shows - the places where people are discovering the show have more worldwide audiences.
I think probably the biggest surprise I see in the charts this quarter is France being a major source of downloads - It was the second-biggest source in January, and was still fifth highest in February and March (which is interesting - usually the biggest non-anglophone country in terms of downloads for the rest of our shows is Germany!). The United States, of course, still a majority of our downloads, although only hovering in the 60% range, which I found interesting for a new show. Admittedly, we haven’t done a great deal of targeted marketing for the show, so a wider spread probably isn’t that surprising.
Floodlight Viscera
We now come to our itty-bitty podcast, Floodlight Viscera. As a reminder, Floodlight Viscera has a monthly release schedule (so we define debut as first 30 days of downloads). It has no real marketing support from us, because that’s not the point of the show - it’s meant to be an adjunct to the Floodlight Viscera zine. As such, it’s downloads are tiny, to the point that doing daily figure isn’t really worth it. So, let’s look at the monthly breakdown:
| Date | Downloads |
|---|---|
| January 2020 | 171 |
| February 2020 | 43 |
| March 2020 | 34 |
So, a few bits and pieces here. Firstly, We see that January had a pretty impressive month, by which I mean around 4-5 people downloaded the archive (as I said, very low figures here!). You’ll note that the debut figures for March drop precipitously, and that’s because the March issues of FLV didn’t happen (there’s a quarantine on, stuff just didn’t align, it happens). So, while there’s still a bit of interest in the archive, the only debut downloads were from the previous month’s episode.
Because the figures are so small, it’s really hard to find a consistent story with the country stats. We can see that January’s interest in the archives appears to have mostly come from the US, and that because the very small statistics, there’s only a few countries represented here. March’s lack of episode showed that a few Australians were looking into the show, but no real patterns reoccuring month to month.
Passer Vulpes Presents
So, in January we decided to drop yet another podcast feed - Passer Vulpes Presents! This is a feed intended to be a place where we can put our occasional one-shot pieces and other miscellanea that we want to share with people. This feed has yet another release schedule, in that it doesn’t have one - When there’s a piece we want to share, it goes on the feed. This feed also doesn’t get much press or marketing attention - like Floodlight Viscera, it’s not intended to be anything big or flashy, it’s just there to showcase our talents.
So, for an irregular podcast, we need to put some definitions on what counts as “debut” and what counts as “archive”, because at some point, we need to decide that a given episode has had it’s run. I’ve decided for the moment that the definition of “debut” will be 1 week - after that, it goes into the Archive category. This is mostly because that way no two episodes will be debuting at the same time, because that kinda feels like it would defeat the purpose of a debut? Anyway, let’s get into the monthly figures:
| Date | Downloads |
|---|---|
| January 2020 | 56 |
| February 2020 | 193 |
| March 2020 | 54 |
So, the numbers that we’re receiving for Presents aren’t really that high - they’re about on par with Floodlight Viscera, which means that I’m not certain that a daily download figure is entirely appropriate for the show. I may change my mind next month - guess we’ll see what the data shows then.
For the meantime, the daily figures do show that our small launch did indeed garner a little interest in the feed. We launched on January 26th, which is indeed visible on the data that we’re seeing. February was the “big” month, since we dropped two episodes that month, but what’s probably most important when talking about the launch details is that the last 5 days of January had as many downloads as the entirety of march, which does tell me that our launch did at least attract a few people!
At this point, I’m mostly looking forward to seeing what kind of pattern emerges with an irregular podcast. A podcast with a regular schedule has a very clear heartbeat (see Seabrooke for an example), I wonder, will Presents look like that heartbeat, just only when an episode comes out? Will there be that peak, or will it be spread out more, as people are less likely to quickly pick up an episode without a schedule? I look forward to more episodes drops to see if we can answer that question.
I think one of the most important things to remember is that when you’re looking at tiny data sets, you’re going to end up seeing a lot of interesting things that, on the whole, don’t end up being that interesting when you look at the numbers. For example, at first glance, it seems pretty weird that Vietnam is our fifth-highest download location for the quarter. Vietnam! We have no connections there, that’s just particularly strange. However when you look at the actual numbers, you see that Vietnam, for the entire quarter, had just 10 downloads, and then you see it for what it is - mostly random noise. The country stats have a benefit once you have a big enough data set, but when 10 downloads is enough to end up at fifth highest, that tells you that apart from the big ones, there’s no real story in the data just yet.
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!