Passer Vulpes Productions Download Stats - Q4 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:
Last quarter we noted that Love and Luck was receiving quite a massive bump in downloads (over 20% over the previous quarter), and while we don’t quite have that level this quarter, we’re still seeing a respectable increase, from 72,492 to 79,470. That’s an increase of 9.63% - Still quite an impressive increase considering that we haven’t been promoting the show particularly much. Again, I have my theories, but I’m going to hold off on them for the moment - The answer, I feel, will be pretty obvious once we get to it.
The daily totals show a continuation in our September bump into October, but past that point the downloads go back to their usual random walk between 500 - 1000 downloads each day - although notably, most days it’s pushing towards the upper level of that range, instead of the lower range. It’s becoming quite uncommon for us to have days of less than 600 downloads, which is an interesting development - again, considering that this year our marketing efforts have been pretty minimal at best!
I wasn’t sure if I was going to bring up the Client charts again, but I think this neatly puts a bow on a few things I’d noticed above. So, last quarter I noted that for the first time, Spotify had become the podcast client that the majority of our listeners used to listen to our show, and I mentioned that this process would only accelerate. Well, unsurprisingly, this is exactly what has happened, to a frankly ridiculous degree - As of December, Spotify is now at 60.13% of our listens, and no other player even comes close to matching Spotify’s dominance. Apple Podcasts had previously been doing reasonably well keeping up, staying in double-figures, but that stopped in December, where downloads from Apple Podcasts accounted for only 7.30% of our listenership.
In fact, As at the end of Q4, Spotify has overtaking Apple Podcasts for total listens/downloads - Spotify now has 201,936 streams, compared to Apple Podcasts’ 166,904 downloads - in percentage terms, Spotify’s 29.12% vs Apple Podcasts’ 24.07%. This is at least as much a story about Apple Podcast’s fall than Spotify’s rise - Spotify’s number haven’t increased particularly much since last quarter (if anything they’re down a smidge), but downloads from Apple Podcasts have plummeted, as the chart shows.
All of this is where I think that sustained increase in downloads is coming from - Spotify just seems to be better at getting our show into the ears of people who want to listen to it. And this appears to be due to Love and Luck being part of Spotify’s general promotion of fictional podcasts (and a good reminder that your cover art is a really important part of promotion!
Image of Spotify promoting our show as part of their “First-class fictional podcasts” category
The Strata chart is pretty much as complex as it’s likely to get, though I think the real story is looking at Episode 1’s monthly totals - they’re continuing to grow, with the last five months all being over 1000 dowloads a month for Episode 1, with September - November hanging around 1400 downloads a month.
An interesting note is that this isn’t necessarily reflecting in the numbers for the rest of our episodes - later episodes of S2 are still hanging around 100 downloads a month. It’s a pretty standard problem with long-running shows though - even if you do get someone interested enough to pick up the show, there’s so many factors around people finishing a show, and the more episodes you have, the greater the investment needed to finish off the show!
Speaking of which, the milestones chart’s been upgraded once more with the episodes that have reached 4000 downloads, but of course not all of our episodes have reached that milestone just yet - which, as we get to a year out from release from many of these episodes, does really show that dedicated audiences for a show as long as ours can take a long time to accrete. And from my discussions with others, 4000 audience members is quite large in the Fiction sphere! Compared to, say, television of film, it’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s still quite an achievement.
Considering the marked drop in Apple Podcast downloads, I was interested to see how that impacted our chart rankings, since obviously only Apple Podcast/iTunes activity is taken into account for those charts. Interestingly, it seems that while there has been a weakening in our position on the charts (we’re seeing lower rankings in Average, High marks and Low marks over the month) It’s not nearly as bad as I would have expected. We’re still popping up on the US page 1 on occasion, and we’re still keeping in the top 100 on the AU on average, but we’re still pretty much constantly in the charts in these two countries. I’m not certain whether this is due to the fact that Apple Podcasts downloads are decreasing for everyone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case.
This month, there’s no particular surprises in the country breakdowns - the US and Australia both were remarkably consistent in their shares over the quarter, as were the UK and Canada, France and Germany, as always giving a good showing, with Phillipines, India, South Africa and Portugal all showing up in various months, as they often do (Portugal, I believe, being the only exception - it’s usually a pretty marginal country in our audience, but we had nearly 10 times the usual downloads in December!)
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, our downloads saw another decrease, although the decrease is starting to taper off - 3953 downloads from last month’s 4741, a decrease of 16.62%. It’s perhaps not too surprising that we’re continuing to see a drop in the figures - Our marketing for the show has been somewhat on ice over the last year thanks to general COVID stress, and with significantly less episodes than Love and Luck, we’re obviously going to see a lower baseline generally. Still, we’re seeing around 1300 a month over this quarter, which if it’s distributed evenly (which of course it never is), is seeing around 100 or so listeners a month picking up the show - numbers that I’m sure a lot of smaller shows would be very happy with.
Moving on to the daily chart, nothing particularly interesting to see on this chart, as it’s a pretty clear random walk at this point, with no obvious peaks or troughs. Last month I made a note that days where we had smaller numbers tended to be followed by days with higher numbers, but that pattern seems well and truly broken at this point, so it probably was an artefact of this random walk pattern of downloads.
I mentioned earlier that if you split our downloads evenly, that’s a little over 100 listeners picking up the show? Well, for a show like Seabrooke, it’s generally a lot better to look at Episode 1 to see how many people are trying out the show - and interestingly over the last 6 months the number of Episode 1 downloads has been incredibly consistent - consistently between 210-260 downloads every month. In fact, looking at the monthly figures per episode, they’re all pretty consistent, honestly - the difference in monthly downloads, it seems, is mostly in individual variances, rather than any particular month or episode doing badly.
On to the Client share chart, The Spotify story is still relevant to Seabrooke, but not nearly to the extent with Love and Luck. I’m not certain if this is solely a numbers game or not? Unlike Love and Luck, Seabrooke’s Apple downloads don’t seem to be impaired, even as Spotify increases it’s number of podcasts.
Moving on to the Milestones chart, Our growth has been small enough that I’ve not needed to add a new line to the chart for the quarter - we’re still working on filling out the 2000 download line. What’s been interesting to me is that the 1000 listener mark took very little time at all - we had enough listeners that that was just part for the course. But as we start getting into higher numbers, the episodes just before the final two just aren’t quite picking up as quick. From current trends, unless we either receive more publicity, or release season two (which we’re working on!), I don’t think we’re going to fill in those figures anytime soon - maybe not even by next quarter.
Moving on to the Chart Chart, we can see that Seabrooke is definitely losing momentum - while it was already struggling quite a bit in the US charts, it was a pretty reliable presence on the AU charts. Nowadays, it’s even starting to drop days on the AU charts as well. Again, this isn’t that surprising - we just haven’t done the kind of publicity for Seabrooke that we did for Love and Luck, and there’s a few reasons for that.
There wasn’t the overarching need like with Love and Luck - no crowdsourcing campaign that we needed to grow quickly to get running.
We’re a bit more savvy around what marketing is worth the money, so there’s less experimenting that gives unexpected results.
COVID has just utterly wrecked our work capacity. Like, just annihilated it.
The Apple Podcast charts are kinda built to be a discovery mechanism, but ultimately you only get to stay near the top if you’re being discovered outside the platform - it’s not true that being number one in a sub-category will let you stay number one in a category, the charts just don’t have that kind of power, at least for our section of Podcastlandia.
On to the Country stats, and as mentioned last week, with the drop in downloads we start to see a bit more variety in who’s listening - We’re seeing odd jumps like Nigeria, Brazil and Turkey, who typically wouldn’t appear with a larger audience just due to demographics. The United States continues to dominate Seabrooke’s audience, with a somewhat higher level of dominance than Love and Luck, although interestingly the proportion of our audience that’s Australian is pretty constant - nice to know that Australians are interested in listening to our show!
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:
This quarter’s totals for Nym are just night and day from last quarter - downloads skyrocketed from 1401 downloads last quarter, to 2983 downloads this quarter - an increase of 112.92%! This kind of growth is absolutely unprecedented, and hasn’t been due to anything we’ve done to promote the show! In fact, the massive growth this month has meant that Nym hit 20,000 downloads in December! It’s always amazing to hit a milestone, and good timing too! Since Nym hit 10,000 downloads last December! It still shows a level of slowdown to our stats - it too 6 months to hit 10,000, and 12 months to double that total - but it is always great to be able to celebrate a milestone!
These days the daily charts often don’t tell that much of a story, but this one does actually give us a bit of an idea of what’s going on - you can see the distinct shift in the download pattern from around October 25, where we then suddenly start having a lot of good days, with only a few days where the daily total is particularly low. The momentum starts to look like it’s petering out for a bit… until December where a bunch of good days brings that momentum right back up again. There’s a lot more volatility in the figures, but the base rate seems to be much higher than in previous months.
On to the Strata chart, and this doesn’t tell us too much more than what we already know - we’re getting a lot of people jumping on to the show on episode one in the last quarter, and that number of listeners tends to drop as we get further along (because it’s a linear story, every episode has a chance of being the last episode that person listens to, and that chance keeps compounding with each episode). One neat thing we can see here is that doubling over the year - Nym really has had about as many downloads in 2020 as it did in 2019, and that’s really nicely reflected in the strata chart.
There is one weird exception here that’s worth noting - Our trailer seems to not be getting much love at all. I’d been wondering about this for a bit, and just chalked it up to low numbers, until I identified the reason - Spotify. Spotify stats don’t quite neatly fall into standard podcast reporting - Spotify classifies listens into Starts (any time you start the episode) and Streams (when you listen to more than 30 seconds of the episode), and Pinecast considers Streams to be the comparable metric - so when Pinecast shows our stats per episode, it’s only showing you the Streams. This is a problem for Nym’s trailer, which is 28 seconds long - it will never register as a Stream, because you cannot listen to over 30 seconds of it. (Note, this isn’t an issue with our data from Love and Luck - Podbean serves it’s files to Spotify listeners directly, so all downloads are treated pretty much equally.
From the data I can see on Spotify’s Podcaster Dashboard, it does seem that people are starting the trailer, but because there are no Streams, Spotify doesn’t show you the in-episode listen rate (something that Spotify does offer you! Consider using it to see where your listeners are dropping off on your episodes!). So, there’s almost certainly more listens for the Trailer than is showing in our stats, but how many more is a very hard question to answer.
Frankly, this chart is probably the image of this post, in all honesty - In the last quarter, Spotify’s proportion of listeners has frankly grown like the damn Blob - Spotify now accounts for over 80% of Nym’s audience, a truly monumental figure, and it looks like it’s solely an increase in the number of Spotify listeners, compared to any other client. Figuring out the reason for this has been a lot harder - It’s true, as noted above, that our number of downloads has just grown immensely this last quarter - There’s very clearly some promotion outside of our control pushing a lot of people toward Nym, and driving them specifically to Spotify. I mean, it could be a spillover from Love and Luck’s promotion, but I would expect a lot more downloads going to Seabrooke as well - the shows are both promoted on the Love and Luck feed in exactly the same place.
It’s possible that Nym is being promoted in the same way on Spotify as Love and Luck - But if that’s the case, I’ve yet to see confirmation of that fact. But wowee, look at that red bulge, that’s genuinely incredible.
On to the Chart chart, and this info goes rather hand-in-hand with the client data - despite a rip-roaring month for Nym, because all the action has been on Spotify, our position the Apple Podcasts charts is actually much weaker, because the number of Apple Podcast downloads has been dropping. What’s a bit frustrating about this is that there are Spotify charts, but because there is no split between fiction and non-fiction, we chart only extremely rarely. Spotify has been great for the extra downloads, but they’re still not exactly the greatest supporters of fiction podcasting!
On to the Country stats! One interesting aspect of the rise in Spotify listens is that we also end up with a smaller percentage of US listeners - don’t get me wrong, the listenership for Nym is definitely quite comfortably majority-US, but we’re seeing a much larger number of countries represented. With that said, the larger numbers don’t quite remove the issues with noise - for example, Vietnam is one our top countries for November (and in fact for the quarter!) - but that’s on a total of 24 downloads (so, 2 people going through the whole catalog).
Still, there’s definitely some clear changes - for example, both ithe UK and Canada had a lot more listeners this quarter than Australia - something that’s not all that common with our shows.
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’s totals aren’t a big surprisem and remain mostly within last quarter’s figures - 58 compared to 74, with very small, but mostly consistent, totals between months. So, no real story to talk about here - the figures just don’t give much to speak to.
On to the country data! The very small number of downloads certainly makes these charts a lot easier to look at! Because of the very small figures, each country surprisingly had only three countries represented each month. Very clearly we have someone in Vietnam who has been going through a lot of our shows - Vietnam has been a continuous presence throughout a good number of our shows in November. Hope you’re enjoying our content!
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.
This month’s totals, interestingly, show something quite fun - ultimately, numbers between last quarter and this quarter were pretty comparable - 241 this quarter compared to 286 last quarter. But when you lay it on the chart, that doesn’t seem right - it’s pretty clear that our number of downloads is falling. The answer, of course, is that July was an incredibly poor download month, with August and September making up for it. Yes, we’re seeing less downloads each month, but no month this quarter was nearly so bad as July was!
As for why the decline? The obvious answer here is that This quarter only had one episode release - Erin basically took a break from releasing FLV content over the quarter (he’s secretly a little pleased about this, because now FLV “Volumes” are January to December, so much neater!)
On to the country stats, and I’m always a little surprised by FLV’s country stats - It’s considerably larger than PVP, so you’d expect there to be a bit more variety in listeners, but this turns out to not be the case at all - There’s clearly some US listeners going through the archive, but nothing elsewhere. You can see in November (where the majority of our debut downloads are) shows a lot more variety than the months without a release - clearly we do have regular listeners to FLV outside the US, but there’s clearly no real point of discovery for those outside the US (and frankly, how we have discovery in the US is a bit of a mystery, no lie!)
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!