I am active in several podcasting communities and was recently struck by this post:
So how do you know if your podcast is a success?
Getting in New and Noteworthy on iTunes? Is it downloads in a month? Getting requests for sponsorships? Hearing your supporters and guests (if you are doing a interview show) that what you are doing is great? Please let me know your thoughts on how to judge your success in podcasting.
What follows here is my response (greatly embellished from what I could originally fit into a Facebook comment box)
Hopefully, you know why you’re in the podcasting game!
It’s very important to define your own success before you dive in.
The best related advice I’ve heard for life in general is:
Measure yourself against your past self
If that doesn’t quite cut it for you in your podcasting journey, you may want some more tangible targets to check yourself against (and to be able to talk about). With so many things to measure, which one is “the only metric that matters”?
Your North Star
In audio publishing, we care about
the total time spent listening to your content
Think about it: it’s a beautifully simple and honest metric to focus on (even if you don’t care about making money from your show). Increasing total listening time is simply a sign you’re increasing your ability to have impact — whether your goal is to inspire people, sell sponsorships or raise awareness of something.
This one number has been called your “North Star” or the “One Metric That Matters”. Medium and other text publishers focus on total time reading (TTR). TTL already stands for “time to live”, so we refer to “total listening time” or “total listening hours” (TLT/TLH).
In practice, podcast listener drop-off points are not well measured, while the duration of episodes tends to be pretty consistent in any given series: so most podcasters focus on a simpler metric: the number of listeners.
So… size does matter?
This “North Star” talk sounds very dramatic — are listener numbers always the be-all and end-all? Of course not! You can define success any way you want! Perhaps you want to save a life with your podcast. Perhaps you just want to pad your CV, gain confidence in a second language or to have a weekly activity to do with your secret crush. If you’re driven by any of these things, congrats: you already know your goal!
For most publishers, success is proportional to listenership size:
then other validators are exciting, but can be distracting.
As with startups, “focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem… to a single problem.”
If your goal is a certain audience size, how exciting is a good review? Well, it’s very exciting, but only as an “input” to help you on your way — not as an “output” in itself. Similarly, getting highlighted in Apple’s New and Noteworthy list of podcasts offers a great boost in growing your audience, so celebrate it (absolutely!), but as a stepping stone, not a destination. You should keep a similar attitude to reactions of guests, being invited to speak at conferences, etc.; all very useful, but not to be confused with your previously-defined definition of success for you.
So how do we define “good”?
There are three archetypes of podcasters:
1. You’re podcasting for the love of it
Some of the best podcasts I know are those made by folks who just want to make their podcast show and share it with the world, no strings attached. They’re not trying to cross-sell, up-sell, affiliate-link-follow-me-now sell; publishing brings contentment — everything else is a bonus.
amateur
noun
A person who does something (such as a sport or hobby) for pleasure and not as a job
French, from Latin amator lover, from amare to love
You may have no minimum threshold for anything — you don’t need to — and you should rejoice in this fact! Reject my assertion that a conference is merely a stepping stone — embrace the meetup for its own enjoyment. The occasional email from a listener, a tweet knowing your message has traveled far, or simply knowing you’re having interesting conversations and growing as a person may be more than the success you need.
My favorite motivations for “being in the game” from podcasting friends include:
“When you feel like you have made a difference. Whether that be to put a smile on one persons face, or to have 1,000 people all donate a dollar to charity.”
“Backrubs from supermodels is my favorite indicator”
“If me and my wife Petra have a good time doing it” [referring to podcasting]
Indeed, for many podcasters, obsessing over monetization and statistics is as unwelcome as obsessing over monetizing running, going fishing at the weekend or playing chess. Imagine asking someone, “Oh, you play guitar? So do you have the right number of fans? How much money do you make?”
For the genuine amateurs, it’s simply not about the output at all.
I can’t imagine a day without doing a podcast. And if I don’t make a dime doing it, I will still do it. But if I COULD make a dime, that would be cool.
If you’re in this camp (lucky you!), remember your mission and keep feeling good.
☺
2. You’re podcasting for profit
You’re excited: it seems like such an exciting way to make money. Sure, maybe it won’t be that lucrative—but hey — it’s definitely money, even if you’re not the next Serial.
And in fact… dare I dream? Is it, perchance, even ‘easy’ money?
Be frank
If money is in fact your primary motivation, you need to be ruthless with yourself.
Calculate in advance: if you expect to get $X from each advertiser per thousand listens, how many listens will you need to make it worth your time, vs. doing another job?
Now defining your success is still personal but very practical.
Napkin mathematics
- You can expect about ~$20 per sponsor per 1,000 listens (a.k.a., CPM, Cost Per Mille). The actual amount podcasters get varies wildly, depending on the length of your show, length of your sponsor message, who your typical listener is, your skills and time spent getting the right sponsor, etc.
How many $20 bills do you need per week to make it worth the effort? You can increase the number of sponsors, number of episodes and number of listeners. - Say your podcast (length) lends itself to two sponsors per episode: that’s ~$40 per thousand listens.
- With a weekly show, if you decide, “I want to commit to this full time… I’ll want to pull in $800 per week from the podcast”… then you’ll need to make sure you’ll reliably get in the order of ~20k real listens per episode.
- Remember, there are umpteen reasons why an episode might be downloaded but never heard (i.e., not all downloads are real “listens”) so your download stats will need to punch well above your target number of listeners per episode. (Since this sum is already rough, say, double your desired number of listens to get a download target.) You have a duty to not mislead advertisers.
Let’s keep this much in our head as a (very rough) rule of thumb:
If you’re podcasting full time,
you may want to attract over ~20k real listens per week — so many more downloads again
Note: Of course, all your income doesn’t have to come from in-podcast advertising (see next section on self-promoting, or other sponsorship arrangements like referral schemes). A show with a billion listens won’t make a penny if you don’t monetize it; conversely, a small but committed audience can pay for your retirement, depending on how they engage with you. The above sum is intended as a very simplified thought guide only, to get a very rough sense of the scale required.
Still, many independent podcasters refuse to think through this math before getting started.
At best, you become the next big name and become very rich simply through podcasting.
At worst, it can be a long and uncertain road, where excitement about the logo, the recording gear and the first few listeners provide a welcome excuse to not calculate your effective hourly wage.
Great expectations
Did you hear about Serial? Oh you did, already? Brace yourself for some sobering calibration points at the other end of the scale.
In 2013, Libsyn reported:
half of the podcasts hosted on Libsyn
get fewer than 200 downloads per episode
That figure is sometimes quoted as closer to 150 downloads (and again, that’s downloads, not listens… so likely under 100 listens…) for which a sponsor might be prepared to pay for one person’s bus ride home, but no more.
Right, no need to panic: we’ll just put a lot more love into the shows we produce.
Thanks to the shows that do achieve an impressive number of downloads, 2014 figures consoled us (somewhat):
the average number of (total) downloads per episode is ~1,700
Summary
Looking to see “what’s normal” can be very misleading… there’s such a massive “long tail” of episodes out there that haven’t been listened to more than 100 times, yet there are also the headline-makers with millions of listens per episode.
Podcasting is still the Wild West. There is no normal.
Safe to say that figuring out what’s normal is far less useful than figuring out in advance what’s “good enough” for you. Concretely, you could be doing “way better than average”, but still fall below your own must-hit targets.
You might even want to give yourself a deadline: “if I get X listeners/income by September, I’ll keep at it; if I don’t, maybe I’ll have to split my time a bit differently.”
3. You’re self-promoting
You may be merely using a podcast to promote your “main” business. This is best thought of as a variation of “podcasting for profit” where the “sponsor” is yourself. Sure, you may even have more (external) sponsors, but you don’t mind if it doesn’t make much money: it’s “another channel” regardless, it gets you new exposure. Perhaps you’re not an independent podcaster, but a large company, looking to podcasting as a way to drive more traffic to your website.
If you’re in this camp, be sure to define how you’ll measure your return on invested time. How will you detect the impact of your podcast? Raw downloads? Can you track how your listeners behave? Do your podcast convert listeners become customers in another way? What other activities could you be doing instead of podcasting and what result would you expect from these? Only you can then decide if this the podcast is a “success” for you.
So, how do I compare?
Notice how none of my answers suggest you define your success based on comparison to other shows.
If other people are SO IMPRESSED by your download/listenership figures, it doesn’t actually make your figures bigger or better.
Conversely, if you socialise with podcasters who are all WAY MORE SUCCESSFUL than you, don’t feel small; you’re probably in exactly the environment you should be.
Podcasting is like any other sport or craft: you’ll do well to surround yourself by experts.
If you’re not spending time around podcasters who’ve already beaten your own targets for success, you’re probably not learning fast enough
Console yourself with that thought when you feel your stats are dwarfed by your podcasting friends. Ask them what they’re doing that you can learn from.
Blurred lines
In reality, all of the above is bullshit, right? Most podcasters don’t neatly fit into just one category. In fact, a typical podcaster will identify with all three motivations:
1. I do love this topic. Of course I could earn more doing other things, but it’s not just about the money; this is who I am, this is what I love.
2. I guess couldn’t continue to put this much time into it if I wasn’t making any money, I do need some sponsorships, so I’ll take what I can.
3. I’m also growing my network, opening myself up to other options in my career as well as my personal life: it’s definitely not just about the sponsorship money.
My challenge to you is not that you artificially box yourself into any one of the above at the exclusion of the others, but merely that you use this article as a thought exercise to help set meaningful targets for yourself. If you are honest to yourself about your main motivations for making your podcast, it’s easier to avoid any self-doubt when you hit your own personal targets, even if they’re orders of magnitude below “what’s normal” in your circle of podcasting friends.
Now I’m a believer
Despite how daunting it can be for new podcasters, I’m a huge believer in podcasts and am delighted to help people succeed with the medium. It’s very important to know in advance what you’re aiming for though, in part to protect yourself from over-investing time in the wrong thing and in part to feel justified in celebrating when you do hit your personal milestones.
It can be scary in the early days, but if you have the passion to pursue it then best of luck and stay positive!
TBC…
This article is a live draft, to be updated.
As a podcaster, what are meaningful thresholds for you? What have I over-simplified or left out? I plan to update this article; Tweet @AwesoundApp or to me directly @MbyM with any specifics I should include.
