Millions Of Podcast Downloads: Are They Achievable Or Is It Too Good To Be True?

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, along the co host, Tracy. Today we're going to talk about millions of podcast downloads. Are they achievable or is it too good to be true? And I'm really glad they're addressing this.

Like it's still a question.

Well, too good to be true, right? Is same. Really same thing, I think. And it's a great topic because there's a lot of misleading numbers out there and we have some information to share to try to help provide, put some perspective on this issue. Because there's a lot of podcast coaches we hear out there that are touting all these amazing numbers of a certain podcast. And people who are just starting out are thinking, wow, I can have millions of downloads of my podcast too. Or they think, oh, I can have millions of listeners of my podcast too.

But let's set this back up. Let's back up a little bit and talk about this. So here's the thing, like, there are lots of people who throw out statistics, and a lot of times they mislead you with the labeling of those statistics. So I do want you to hear that and be very careful. So when they say, oh, I have X million monthly downloads, first off, your red flag is downloads. Secondly, they probably meant lifetime, not monthly, right? Especially they're in the millions, right? Because look, it's been cited everywhere and I've seen it repeated in news magazine after news magazine that Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners per episode. And he says that's not true. He even cites it. He is at about 2.2. So if Joe Rogan is getting 2 million per episode and you're only producing 4 episodes a month, and you're claiming 50 million downloads per month in your show, like it's not physically possible that you could be better than Joe Rogan. Like, we know he's the number one podcaster. He tops every top ten list for the total downloads. So you gotta think about these numbers as like, oh, there's a mistake here. And I've seen it. I've actually seen it. So I was giving an Investor pitch somewhere. And someone came on as the podcasting expert. I'm giving a pitch about my company, and they come on and they cite a very misleading statistic. And the part that I don't understand is why she even shared it. So she said that there was this show and it really was a network and not a show. So she misled there.

So that's the first flag, right? Big, big difference.

Right, Right. So the statistics are right, but not right. And that's really it. It's like she caught 50 million downloads, okay? And so that's the number she went. She said they were monthly and they were on a show. They were really lifetime and they were on a network.

Network of show of half a dozen.

Shows with thousands of episodes total. So like well over 3,000 episodes total across the whole network. Yes, you're talking about that as well. So lifetime downloads versus plays. So, like, that's also a misleading number there. And remember, the difference between downloads is I downloaded to my device, but I haven't listened to it. A play is I actually listen to it. And listeners, the number of listeners you have are your subscribers, in a sense, the actual total number of people. Because I might have played an episode twice, or I might have played it on two devices, listen to half on one and half on another. So even plays can be slightly off in their numbers. And so it still doesn't express your total number of listeners. We have to estimate that because Apple, Spotify, all of those places refuse to share your actual subscriber number.

So the thing to really understand, especially for new aspiring podcasters, is that the reality is when people, especially a podcast coach, and this is the puzzling part, who's trying to attract more people to become podcasters, you set these lofty expectations, you present these misleading numbers that would indicate, oh, wow, that's really nobody who's nationally well known, and they have a podcast getting 5 million downloads a month. Wow. I could do that too. And it sets this new podcaster, aspiring podcasters, or even existing podcasters up for major disappointment when they.

I don't know how any coach does.

That, plays a month or a few thousand plays an episode. Right.

I don't know how they do that and get return business, because I'd never. I mean, if you failed on that, to live up to that, to build my show to that, and that's your job, and that's what you're supposed to do. Wow, you failed miserably. I'm never going to recommend you to anyone, and I'm going to quit Podcasting really quickly. So this, it's not a winning strategy to stay state misleading numbers. It is unethical, and I don't know why they do it. And I have to think that in this particular case, this person is going with a group of investors trying to oversize the market. It's like doing like total available market instead of doing like actual achievable market.

Billion market for this business. So we should be able to get one percentage of that and get one billion, right? Yeah, exactly. It's just. Right.

It's like, it's that mentality. But we all know from watching Shark Tank and watching these things that real, true people in the know scoff at that because they actually know how to do the math. And that's, I think, what we're pointing out here, right, Tom, is like, you're not doing the math. So let's do the math on 50 million downloads, lifetime value. Okay, let's say 5,000 episodes, because math's easier, right? Like, let's just do that. It's like almost 4,000 episodes, but let's do five just to make it easier. So if we do five into 50.

Million, you're going to get 10,000 downloads an episode.

10,000 downloads an episode. That is barely qualifying for advertisement. So let's continue to do the math.

With some advertising groups. For sure, it does.

So most advertisers say at minimum, you have to have 20,000 downloads per episode to qualify for the ad programs that are there. But there are some smaller networks that will allow 10,000 and so 10,000 per episode. So you just met the minimum metric. But remember, they divide that by a thousand. So now we're at. What we're going to pay on is 10,000 divided by a thousand. So we get to. We get to 10, right?

Yeah. Right.

So now we multiply that by the industry going rate, which is around $20.

An episode or $20 per thousand. Right?

$20 per thousand. Right. So now we're at $200 an episode, and that's being generous. So we're saying $200 an episode, but I got to split that with the network. So I'm actually only going to make $100 an episode. So now I paid a lot of money to be in this network, probably because I am pretty sure most of them charge you. That's why they're citing these kind of downloads. So you're going in there and you're really only going to make $100 an episode.

Right.

Does that even pay your expenses? Does that. I don't do anything for a hundred dollars an hour ever. I can't remember. I mean, my billable rate even 10 years ago was a thousand dollars an hour, so.

Well, you're still not, you're not going to make an awful lot of money on it. Might you cover some of your expenses? Maybe if you're doing five episodes a week, you're doing 20amonth, maybe you get 2,000 bucks. That might cover some of your expense.

But that assumes that the network does 100% of the heavy lifting to get those statistics. And here's the reality of it is if the average show is 10,000, there's probably 2% of those shows carrying the weight for everyone else and they're jacking up the numbers and everyone else is somewhere far beyond. Right. Because it's the middle ground. Right. It's the average.

Right. So, I mean, I think this all sets up a very unrealistic, you might even say false expectation for success in podcasting. Because I could tell you and Tracy could tell you from vast experience, you do not need to have 10,000 downloads an episode to be successful. You can have 500, you can have a thousand. It really depends on how you measure success. Success with third party advertisers to really make money is only one potential measure of success.

Right. And that's why we plan and layer in success along the way. So there's always monetization strategies laid in from the beginning. So is my strategy maybe the network that I'm trying to create, the relationship that I'm building with my guest, is it a funnel that I'm going to create from my guests, is it a JV partnership that I'm going to create with those guests? What is the model for that that is going to actually expand? Is it a LinkedIn strategy that I'm employing and using the podcast as a content creation, but it's really a LinkedIn strategy. Like it could be. I mean, there's dozens of different ways that you could be modeling all of this, but your monetization has literally nothing to do with the number of downloads of your show.

Right. And you know what, let's get back to sort of the perspective on some of the numbers, Tracy, because like you're saying in that albeit simple math model, getting to 10,000 downloads per episode, let's talk about plays and. Or play through. Right?

Right. Because there also might not be, like, I didn't even say that there might be plays. And you might have half as many plays as you have downloads that can happen. But then how many of Those people played through. It is also a statistic that you don't know. And on this network, especially when radio networks put up a whole bunch of disparate shows. So like, I mean, if it was a network completely focused on one topic, like we know a couple that put together a network that was all on woo woo, spirituality, podcasting and that kind of thing, and they really didn't make money off of the advertisements, although they had over a million downloads a month that they were going on on a regular basis across the whole network. Yeah, and this was a few years ago, so they could definite hit a good metric. But because their metric was completely focused in their whole network, it was completely focused on the certain type of person who would be listening. They had more likelihood for success in the ad model than another network. That is just like broad brush. Let's have financial podcasts, sports podcasts. Let's mix them all up. Right. And when you mix them all up, the advertisers get like, the ad value goes way down.

No, it really makes sense now. Look, I think when we talk about measuring success, that's where things get very much to be different based on your perspective or your goals. Right. I mean, having a podcast that has 50 million total downloads across the network and maybe 4 or 5 million downloads a month, is that a measure of success? Gosh, yes, that's a huge success. But when you have four or five thousand episodes across the network and people subscribe, they're going to get downloaded all those episodes and they probably aren't going to listen to all of them. So too much downloads to play through actual playthrough might be a mere fraction, I mean, 10%, 20% maybe of all your episodes. And it would take people a long time to catch up.

And they're distracted by all the other episodes, all the other people, all the other shows. That's where a lot of these radio networks are. Right? Because when you think about radio, a radio station is very like talk show radio. As they go from a medical show to a home show to a psychological help show. Like, you know, you just like go from all of these different things all the time. And so they're just, they don't care about the. They care that they have a certain number of listeners every hour, but they don't care what fits the bill there. Like, they're not looking for that. They'll put anything in it and see what plays. And it's kind of a shotgun approach. Like that's how they do it. And so that's where we worry about whether or not you're making the right choices. So this is why I want to bring this up is thinking about your choices as who you're going to work with or where you're going to locate your show. We're getting a lot of networks pushing people to come on their network and months later they quit those networks, they don't get results. We see it again and again and again and no matter how many times I say I don't think you're going to get the results that you're looking for. There's been a lot of failure there. This is the question you should ask. They don't ask the question. They get clouded and hyped up by 5 million, 50 million downloads number and they won't achieve it and they won't achieve the numbers. So let's do the math for now on. If you're going to join the network because you give away some rights, you give away authority, you give away identity, you give away brand, you give away a lot of things to be associated over there in these networks. And if they're not spending money, and so that's the number one question, I want to know how much money are you spending to drive traffic to my show? My show in specific, not the network in general. My show in specific. Now it can be the network in general as long as the network is a hundred percent my audience. Right. Like I'm okay with that if that's, I have a hundred percent, that's the kind of audience I would like to reach. I'm good with that. So if you got a sports podcast and it's sports network and they're driving you all sports fans and they're spending the money at the network level, but they're spending a significant decent amount to drive new listeners. I want to hear that. Okay, great. Now you're spending money to drive people for me. So I'm not spending that or I am spending it, but I'm contributing. I'm just contributing. By being on your network and paying for that privilege, then how much does the average person earn? How much is the low and how much is the high? And then from there, what is the real play and subscriber number? Now if they tell you they have the subscriber numbers, they're lying. Like that's a red flag. It's a trick question because they don't have it. They can tell you we've estimated it to be this number of subscribers or they have an opt in. And this is the opt in on our network page. That's a decent number. You want to know that. That's a great number. That's kind of like what is their email list circulation.

I want to talk about this sort of Internet radio model for a second, Tracy, because I think it's really important. We do see a lot of people being disappointed after their experience participating with an Internet radio model, which is syndicated as a podcast also a lot of the time, maybe most of the time today. And the problem is these radio networks still think of their audience in terms of the big picture, aggregate audience. Like, we have this many people that listen to our shows or our radio station or radio network every month. Now, some of those are going to be estimated numbers. Again, terrestrial radio is fraught with estimated audiences because there's no actual way to measure how many people are listening to randomly on the open airwaves. Right. But when you get to Internet radio, how many streams, downloads, plays, and also a podcast is very measurable, but it's very notorious. We see radio networks actually do not share the actual data with individual show hosts, creators, podcasters who have a show on their network. Whenever I talk to people, I've been in this network and they tell me my playthrough is this, or they tell me my audience is this, but they don't let them log in and see any analytics anywhere. That's the first red flag for me.

If they're not being specific to you, that are not generalized, because they will share you generalized statistics, but they will not share them specifically for your show. And that's a red flag.

Yeah, and here's the thing. This is 2022. When we're recording this, folks, the numbers are there, the data is there. I don't care if it's people listening Internet radio through the website of the radio network or listening to the podcast through an app. The actual data of how many people are listening exists. And if you're on a radio network and they are unwilling to be transparent about that data and let you see it, if they're emailing you an email saying, oh, here's your numbers, and they're writing it in an email for you, I personally don't trust that at all. I want to log in and see the actual dashboard where the analytics are collected to show you those numbers. And I meet people every. Every week who are coming from radio networks and they have no idea. They think they're being told they're getting all kinds of value, but there's no proof at the end of the day.

But the number one problem is it's like if I type their show name into the search engine that is a podcast player, 90% of the time I can't even find their show. It doesn't show up properly because it's not actually list, it's an episode as.

Its own show as its own show.

So it's not listed at a show level. It's listed only as an episode level when you're in a network. So it's like the X Radio network. And then that's the name of the show at the Apple directory level or the Spotify directory level. And your show is just one little episode blip on it, assuming they title it right there. And that's where I find a lot of mistakes happen too. And you don't find it. And so if I also type your name in there, you're not a host, the radio network's the host. So you don't show up either. Oh my gosh, you guesting will probably show up before you hosting your own show. And so that's really where you're talking about this muddiness that you've given away your brand, you've given away your authority, you've given away all of those things and probably paid for it and not received back proper statistics and probably not received value back for it either in dollars.

And if you knew the actual statistics and numbers, you would realize.

Is not really acting your best interest. They usually are acting in their own trying to have more content to attract more people to their network. They're not usually bringing as much value to the individual podcaster, bringing you audience or making you available where there is known existing audience for your topic available. So we sort of gotten a little bit.

I just want to put this in context why Tom and I can see this so clearly. Okay, so we can see very clearly because we pulled our statistics globally at the end of last year across every single show we produce. And remember, we produce well over 10,000 episodes a year. Like, I mean numbers are off the chart is way over that. Yeah, but and you know, lifetime how many we've produced hundred thousand episodes. Like, so the numbers that are in our system are very high. And I can tell from doing this, like our clients, we hit 50 million downloads last year per month. And those are not downloads, those are plays. Because it's actually pulling the file, not just downloading the file, it's actually playing the file. Like we can see that data. So we know we can hit 50 million plays per month across our network of over a thousand shows. So we've got over a Thousand shows doing it. But we've got tens of thousands of episodes in that mix. And when we look at that, we say, okay, I can tell the average. And the average is hovering somewhere around 5,000 downloads an episode. Or less. Or less, yeah, or less. And that's as if we also cut new shows seasons. Like if we cut them into three boxes, which we do, if your show is 90 days old, it shouldn't be measured against one that's nine months old or nine years old. Like, it's just not the same. So we cut them into three buckets when we look at that and say, okay, here, but a good season show that hits over 500 episodes, like the ones on the network we were talking about should really be doing that. And we can see clearly those ones are running around 7,500 downloads on average a month. So, like, if that's the case and we have such a broad brush of independent shows, that's probably more accurate a number. And you know, here's where I liken it to YouTube. I see a lot of people, I've been in presentations where people are like, I got a million plays of my video or 100,000. No, they'll say it's on their channel, but it's actually one video on the whole channel, right? And when you do the math, it's not physically possible for them to have 500 subscribers. If you hit a million views of a video, the math's terrible. So if that's the case and your million view video is only converting to 500 subscribers, your conversion rate stinks. And you really ought to get out of the video business, right? Because this is not what you need to do. And so what it says to me is in video, it's typical to see bot views, and bot views don't subscribe, right? Because they're not real people. It's a farm, and it's a bot farm somewhere, or a human farm sometimes that are clicking and watching the video and just letting it play and then watching the next video. And that's all they do all day. That's their job. So they're not going to subscribe to your channel. There's not a clear link between that. So when we see a 10X. So if I've got 500 subscribers and most of my videos are getting 500 views, I've got an incredible channel because I've got 500 people who are watching 100% of my content. That's the ideal of where we want to go. Now, you won't achieve that, but that's the idea of where you want to be, right? You want to have a good ratio to subscribers and play through. Now, podcasting is unfortunately misleading in and of itself, but it's all Spotify and all Apple and all the players faults for refusing to share your subscriber data. So I'm going to keep saying that and I'm going to keep being mean about it in the industry because one day they will change. They will have to give you connection to your subscribers.

Which actually, to YouTube's credit, they do. They show you how many people are subscribed. They don't reveal. Well, I think you can actually see, can't you, who the usernames are. Even if you want to behind the.

Scenes, you're left behind the scenes with them, right?

Yeah. But even if the podcast apps didn't give transparency as to who those usernames are, because that again, they regard as their private data. If they just gave you the information of how many people are actually subscribed, kind of where they do, how many reviews, how many ratings do you have? You know, on Apple, that would be useful information to have. But in podcasting we have to estimate how many subscribers we have. And usually when you publish a new episode, within 12 to 24 hours, everybody that subscribed has received your episode. And more people, as it's advertised on social, people find it on your website or they randomly play it and aren't a subscriber. Happens usually not within that 12 to 24 hours after you publish it. So there are ways to estimate how many people are subscribed, but it's still an educated guess. It is in no way a stat you can depend on or tout in the industry, as I have this many subscribers.

Right. And so, and this is though, at least from a perspective of if I wanted to advertise on your show or if I was going to buy your services, I can go check this number on YouTube and I can clearly see your subscribers, your number of views. It has an alignment to it or an X factor to it. So like you maybe have 500 subscribers and you've got a, oh, 40% of them are watching every single video. Awesome. Like, that's a really great play. But if we're looking at it from the perspective of we have no way to double check that, then you have to ask the important questions. If you're going to evaluate giving away your authority in this network situation or you're going to fall, if you're going to get seduced by these multimillion dollar Download numbers that a network is portraying for you. Ask for the math. You got to get to the math and ask for proof on that, because otherwise it's really not worth it. And this is what I hear again and again, why there's such a high pod fade rate, why so many people leave a network. People quit their shows because they can't get out of their network contract. So then they lose all their content. They lose everything that they created. All their intellectual property is gone because they signed it away. So we have to be really careful with that. And that's why Tom and I are pointing this out to you is like, this is not a model. We're success in the podcasting industry. And anyone who's telling you that is.

Selling you something or selling you future disappointment when your show doesn't achieve hundreds of thousands or even a million downloads in a month. That's not the goal for the vast majority of us podcasters out there, and I don't think it really should be for the vast majority. There is real value you can bring to your audience, have people that really are subscribed and waiting for your next episode to publish, getting great value from it. That also can produce a great return for you as a podcaster. Now, what that return, what that goal is for you, will be different for everybody in some respects, but tremendous value to be had just with having several hundred to 500 real active, engaged listeners every episode or every month. And yes, some will have thousands and some will have tens of thousands. And we do see that there's quite a range. But shows that have been established for years and have several hundred episodes. You know what I mean, that it doesn't always happen overnight, right?

Absolutely. And that's where a seasoned network is going to do better. And this is where some of these networks are. Like, I've heard this as answer one, when I asked for the math. Okay, when you ask for the numbers or say, hey, why can't I get a real report? Oh, we're building that into the future of the next version of our portal so that you'll be able to get your single show statistics. But it never happens. And the reason it never happens is because it's not in their best interest to build it. They'll never put it on their development list because it's not in their best interest to build it, because then they'd be revealing to you that you're not succeeding. Fast forward faster because you'd be able to watch that and so you'd know that you weren't it wasn't working and you'd complain sooner, you'd try to get out of your contract faster. And so this is the way that.

They, or more importantly, Tracy, they're not providing enough value to justify you giving up some of your independence and to be on that network. So many different issues at play here. You're right. It's interesting, Tracy. I mean, we certainly have built in, in our platform the ability for every individual podcaster hosted there to have complete transparency into all your numbers. I mean, they're there and I, we believe you should have access to it now.

Right. And we built the network model differently too. So the network model is it's basically there can be a network that controls a whole series of shows, but each show is individual and each person within that, the host of those shows can log in their aggregate. In terms of looking at all the numbers across all my episodes, across all my shows in the network, I can look at it from that perspective, but I can also deep dive, dial deep so that every single person can have their individual access. So we built our network that way to make that happen. But I want to just say last thing before we head out of this episode is really, ethically, you and I have been pushing for this full disclosure model of podcasting, right? And podcast strategist program, the certified strategist program we built in Poditize. We did it with this model of proving to you why, as a coach, a podcast coach, a podcast consultant, a podcast producer, a podcast network, whatever it is that you are, why it is in your long term sustainable best interest for profitability for you to have full disclosure built into your process, for you to be upfront about it. Because what we found in our business is that referrals return business and lifetime value. Long time people staying with us for a very, very long time makes much better difference in terms of our profitability than us having to spend a whole lot more money on lead generation and seducing people into our program. Right? It costs more to get a new client than it does to keep one and get them to refer people. And that's what we've been training and teaching our certified strategists that viewpoint and model. And at the end of the day, I believe we're creating much more ethical certified strategists out there. And I'm thrilled with that. That's what we want to change the industry model.

And we want to set realistic expectations for results that are measurable, very measurable, but realistic expectations for where success resides. I mean, here's the thing because our.

Job is to find it with you.

You don't have to have crazy statistics, download numbers, really lofty numbers. You don't have to have 10,000 an episode to get great success out of it. In fact, I mean, there are certainly shows that are doing it on our platform and even some of our own shows do that or have done that. But you can get tremendous success with several hundred listeners. You don't have to have several thousand listeners, but hopefully you see continued growth and increase and you will get there. And there's the rare show that launches and in the first month gets 50,000 downloads across what they publish. I mean, it happens.

But my point is it happens rarely. And there's usually another factor. They had a giant email list, they have a really social following. There's usually another factor that's involved in that. If you really dove in to figure it out. I mean, look, Gary Vee can go and start a new podcast tomorrow, start a new channel, start a TikTok, start just about anything. And he already has a built in audience that will go check out what he's doing. You're probably not like that and you need advice, you need services. You need companies, networks and people to support you that are looking at it from the perspective of you're not that. You're not Gary Vee, you're not Joe Rogan. So let's talk about what really will work for you. Well.

And what your goals are and what that measure of success will be. Because there's.

Exactly. Because there's success.

There's different for everybody. Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, hey, letting us rant about the industry.

Thank you for indulging us here, listeners. We really appreciate that. But we just hope that we are, by being harsh about this, we hope we'll continue to, with our influence, be able to change these things that are wrong. Look, I'm happy if our competitors up their game. Good. Then the whole industry is going to improve and it's going to actually make life better for our clients. That's where we're going.

All right. Tracy couldn't say any better than that. We'll drop the mic there. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazzard on feed.

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