Passer Vulpes Productions Download Stats - Q2 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.

This month you might notice that the charts and tables have gotten much shinier! Previous Stats posts used Everviz charts, which has been a significant cost to use the last quarter or so. Also, I’ve never been 100% happy with Everviz’s charts, so I was delighted when I found out about Datawrapper, and discovered their free level let me do absolutely everything I wanted! So, enjoy the shiny new tables and charts, and let me know what you think of them. Anyway, let’s get into the numbers!

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. Let’s start, as always, with the monthly totals:

This month, our quarterly download total for Love and Luck edged up a bit higher again compared to last quarter - 59,210 compared to 57,834, an increase of 2.38%. But what is perhaps most exciting, is that Love and Luck hit 500,000 downloads/listens across all platforms in April! To be precise, we hit that total on April 29th 2020, where we ended the day with 500,154 listens. It’s not something I’ve tooted about because, of course, this is across all platforms, and I don’t keep daily tabs on the all platform number - I only see that when I’m making these posts! But hey, since it’s a milestone, how about we look at the historical growth of the podcast for this prestigious occasion:

I want to talk about this, because I think it’s genuinely worth point out here: The first three months of our podcast literally do not appear on the chart, compared to afterwards. In fact, the point where our downloads appear? Was actually the day that we advertised on Wonderful!, a McElroy podcast. That was probably the best money we ever spent advertising the podcast, but I also want to point out to new podcasters launching their show - the first few months of your show are very rarely going to have the kind of explosive growth you might desire. If you want big growth, you will generally need to find big audiences to tell about your show, and getting access to those big audiences generally will require paying for it.

Moving on to the daily totals, you might have noticed in the monthly table that May was a significantly better month during the quarter, and this chart shows that the big action was literally in three days in May, from May 12th to May 14th. So far as I can tell, Love and Luck got on the front page of Spotify again, which always leads to a massive jump in downloads. What I always find interesting about these big jumps is that they never seem to make any real difference to the numbers afterwards, which I’d expect seeing as there’s a lot of backlog, and Spotify users don’t download en masse.

Moving along to the Milestones chart, and I mostly wanted to stop in to add another milestone to the list - We now have time to first 3000 on the list as well. Again, we’re not seeing a great deal of variance in the shape of the lines from 2000 onwards - It seems that for the most part, episode growth at this point is pretty consistent among most episodes (with the clear exceptions of Episodes 1 and 48, the season premieres). What we do see is that massive speed up at episode 101 - while it’s going to be some time before Season 3 is done and ready to go out, I’m expecting that the download velocity is going to be of a different scale when new episodes start again, by these figures (which I guess is good - it means that people aren’t immediately unsubscribing once they’ve finished the show!)

Moving along to the strata chart, my biggest takeaway this month is looking at the earlier episodes, compared to the later episodes - there’s a clear and visible difference in numbers there, and it’s actually a really smooth transition (when episode 48 is taken out of the mix) - there’s no particular episode when the numbers drop or anything, it’s just a slow drop from Episode 1 to Episode 99, and it’s quite consistent month-to-month too.

Jumping into the Charting chart (nope, still haven’t come up with a better way of saying that), I can see that Love and Luck’s position in the US chart is a little more variant than previous months - right up until the middle of May, when it stays right in the 50-150 range on the US charts. The AU chart doesn’t have the sheer variance, but it does continue the general trend of us being higher on the AU chart than the US chart, and there’s no real point of stability like the US chart this month.

So, one of the wonderful benefits of Datawrapper is that is does, just, the best maps, so instead of just having to deal with the Top 10 each month, we can now see the numbers for every country! And what we can see here is just how many countries are getting into the show - I’m not certain that we’re quite at the point where we’re being downloaded in more countries than not, but it’s gotta be pretty close.

In fact, I suspect part of the reason for that is Spotify - I mentioned in the daily breakdown that Spotify put our show on their front page, and it doesn’t look like this is country-specific, because we can see the sheer breadth of countries in May from that short spike, almost knocking the US off it’s perennial position as our clear majority of our audience.

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:

In what is probably not terribly surprising, last month’s bumper crop of downloads did not continue this month - our downloads dropped from 14801 to 6265, a drop of 57.67%. Considering March was such an enormous month, it’s probably no surprise that April was the odd month out this month, with downloads tapering off by May, back to roughly December 2019’s totals.

Jumping into the Dailies, and similar to Love and Luck’s totals, we can see the big contributor to April’s high figures was one big spike, oddly enough just around my birthday on April 11. The culprit? We were featured in a Gizmodo article that day. You might note that Seabrooke’s spikes don’t tend to be quite as dramatic as Love and Luck’s, but there’s a really obvious reason for that - Seabrooke has 12 episodes, Love and Luck has 101, so there’s never going to be that sheer mass of downloads from promotion elsewhere.

So, I decided to build a milestone chart for Seabrooke, small as it is now, so I can keep track of that all important velocity of downloads. In comparison to Love and Luck, Seabrooke’s velocity to 500 was much quicker - not surprising considering we’re not starting from scratch in audience. Getting to 1000 took a much longer, but got a lot quicker as the season progressed, and 1500 seems to be taking a while for most episodes, apart from Episodes 11 and 12, which if you’ll recall were episodes that came out after our March spike last quarter. I’ll be interested to see what the figures show in the coming months.

The strata chart doesn’t have too many surprises this month, although I am curious about why Episode 11 continues to have such anomalous results, even past the March spike. Otherwise, Episodes 1 and 12 continue to be the leaders in downloads, both of which being unsurprising (Episode 1, because most people will prefer to start from the beginning, and Episode 12 because it’s the most recent episode, which a lot of podcatchers will download automatically).

Moving onto the Charts chart, A few points of interest - firstly, Seabrooke is still not consistently appearing on the charts at all - it was only charting 67% of the time in the US charts, and 76% of the time on the AU charts. We see a similar pattern from Love and Luck’s charts in that Seabrooke tends to keep a higher figure on the AU charts than the US charts, and last month’s observation that the two charts tended to reflect each other is much weaker this quarter.

Moving along to the Country stats, Again no major surprises here, and the top five are remarkably consistent, and the next five being wildly inconsistent, due to the relatively lower numbers here - the threshold for top 10 appears to be anything higher than around 20 downloads for a month, which is really just 1-2 people downloading the whole series. This isn’t as bad as some of our other shows, where the country stats just cannot tell us anything, but it does mean treating some of these numbers with some caution, since there’s a lot of noise here.

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:

So this quarter showed a significant drop in downloads compared to last quarter, with 1,634 compared to 2,765 last month, a drop of about 40%. Last quarter we mentioned that the baseline for Nym increased as a result of our presentation on Radio Drama Revival, however that doesn’t seem to have lasted - we’re now back to the roughly 500 or so a month we had before that appearance.

Onwards to the dailies, and there’s not much to add here, except for the fact that this quarter, we’ve actually started to have some days where we’ve had no downloads or listens at all, which is quite surprising - Nym hadn’t had a zero day up to this point.

On to the Strata chart, and again no real surprises here - Episodes 1 and 12 still the leaders, with the rest of the episodes not really varying in downloads overly much.

Moving on to the Charts chart, and I will say one thing that is striking about Nym’s chart performance is just how rarely it pops up in the AU charts at all, and even in the US charts, it’s all over the place. I’ve been curious as to whether the Science Fiction Apple charts are more volatile or not? There seems to be many more shows in that area, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a bit easier for shows to drop in and out of the charts compared to the Drama charts.

Moving on to the Country stats, and I think that probably the big point of interest is April and just how much more diverse the listening population was that month! There’s not a great deal of variance in the numbers here, and as I’ve often mentioned, the US is quite regularly our majority country for all our podcasts, just due to the sheer demographic power of that market, so knocking the US off that majority takes quite a bit.

With that said, countries outside the top 3-5 continue to be very noisy, with a lot of variance, just due to the relatively low number of downloads. There are countries in the top 10 in May that only have 1-2 downloads!

Floodlight Viscera

And 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.

So, it looks like FLV has settled back down into it’s regular pattern - a smallish group of regular listeners, with the very occasional new listener turning up (as happened in May). New listeners tend to have out-sized effects on the figures, because FLV has 45 episodes in the queue - and those episodes are short enough that someone interested in listening might well download them all, although the archive listens show that nothing like that has happened this quarter.

Moving on to the Country stats, I think the thing that really makes me post these every month is just the fact that there is not top 10 each month, because there’s usually 5 or less countries downloading the show! To the UK and French listeners enjoying the feed, I salute you!

Passer Vulpes Presents

And finally we get to our most recent show, 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:

Last quarter I split the data to dailies, but as you can see, this month PVP got less downloads than Floodlight Viscera, so there isn’t really enough data for daily charts to reveal anything, and until more stuff shows up on the feed, this is probably how I’ll manage it for now.

Getting to the actual data at hand, I feel like the small numbers really just highlight the lack of pattern here - the last three months have very different totals, with no real rhyme or reason to the variance. This is definitely a “more data required” situation here, either more discovery or more releases.

Similar to Floodlight Viscera, PVP has such low figures that there’s not really a top 10 countries, rather instead it’s top 5 at best. June’s paltry sum of 9 downloads means that Poland, with four downloads, is the second-top country, so high to our Polish listeners! Otherwise, again, low numbers mean extreme variance, which is very reflected in the data above.

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!