Ep 101: Why Podcast Stats are Complete BS

[00:00:00] Verity Sangan: Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Lady Girl's Guide to Podcasting. It is great to have you here as ever. I'm Verity. If this is the first time that you have listened to the podcast, It's great to have you. Thanks for joining us. And if you are returning, then it is also great to have you here as well. Last week's episode, I absolutely loved. We talked all about how important it is to take a break from podcasting if and when you need to. So if you haven't listened to that by the way, that was the 100th episode, which is so exciting. But if you haven't had a chance to listen to that yet, make sure you go back and listen to it. If you have already listened to it, then let's just crack on with today's episode, where I promised you we're gonna be talking all about why podcasting statistics are absolute BS. And what I mean by this is I think that so often in podcasting, we get so wrapped up with the whole, if you want to be a top 50% podcaster, if you want to be a top 1% podcaster, if you want to be a top 10% podcaster, like, whatever this looks like and the whole thing, excuse my English, but the whole thing's just a load of crap because nobody can agree on what it means to be a top 1% podcaster or a top 50 percent podcaster and all this kind of thing and I just see so many people throwing around all this information being like 'I can help you be a top 50% podcaster, I help you be a top 1% podcaster. Like and all these different statistics. And it's, like, what does that actually mean? And I think there's some kind of illusion that if you suddenly fall into this bracket of being a top whatever percent podcaster, then all of a sudden your podcast is bringing in loads and loads of money and you've, like, made it and, you know, I don't know. I just think that there's so many illusions around this. So what we're gonna do in this episode is look at 3 different measurements that are used to determine where you sit in the podcast percentages so the first one which is probably the one that the majority of people or the majority of podcasters are most familiar with is the buzzsprout statistics. Their information comes from IOV, I should say, and they put together these kind of rankings and they basically say that if you have this amount of downloads from your latest episode in the first 7 days of release then this is where your podcast sits statistically from a percentage point of view. So I've got I'm recording this at the end of August 2024, and I've got the latest stats will have come which will have come from the month before, which is July 24. And in July 2024, in order to be considered a top 50% podcast using Ussprout, you only needed 29 downloads in the first 7 days of your podcast episode's new release in order to be considered that top 50% podcast. That doesn't sound like an awful lot, does it? But at the same time, that's that it that is a lot. To be considered a top 25% podcast using these statistics, you need to have a 112 downloads in the first 7 days of release. To be a top 10% podcast, your latest episode needs to have 472 downloads in the first 7 days of release. To be considered a top 5% podcast, you need 1094 downloads in the first 7 days of release. And to be considered a top 1% podcast, you need 4,740 downloads within the first 7 days of your episode's release. These stats do vary ever so slightly month to month, but they don't vary that much. They normally go up and down by 10 downloads one way or another. I mean, top 50%, 29 downloads is the lowest I've seen in a while. It's normally sitting between 30 35. However, those are the download stats that Buzzsprout saying that you can then use those to measure whether or not you're in the top 50%, 25%, 10%, 5%, or 1% of podcasts globally. I've got a massive problem with these stats. First of all, I just don't think they mean an awful lot. I mean if you look at lazy girl's guide to podcasting, I'm going to be completely honest with you, according to buzzsprout statistics we sit in the top 50% of podcasts because usually on the first 7 days of release, roughly speaking, each podcast episode gets just below the 100 mark download which is great. I absolutely love that. I am so grateful to everybody who downloads a podcast episode. Some of you might be thinking oh my gosh that's loads' or the might of you might be thinking oh it's not very much at all' but I'm just being completely frank and honest with you here I will be getting around 100 downloads that doesn't include the YouTube statistics but I'll get around 100 downloads within 1st 7 days of release so using the buzzsprouts information that means that lazy girl's guide to podcasting is a top 50% podcast but, and this is where it gets interesting because according to the buzzsprout, I'm over 4 and a half 1000 downloads within the first 7 days of release of an episode coming out of being off a top 1% podcast. However, despite being a top 50% podcast, The Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting is also a top 1% podcast. Let that sink in for a minute. We are a top 50% podcast. We are also a top 1% podcast. I'm going to explain that to you because there are other rankings, and podcasters do use these statistics, that if you produce and publish more than 21 episodes per year then you are a top 1% podcast, and this is very much based on the fact that approximately 90% of podcasts fail by not making it beyond episode 20. Now I say fail because I actually think this is a massively flawed and skewed statistic and I've thrown this up online before when people have said things about, like, you know, you have to make it past 20 episodes otherwise your your podcast is dead. And I've challenged a couple of people about this before where I've been like 'but what if you were only there for a limited run?' So I'll give you an example. I listened to a podcast recently. It was called Witch. It was really good. It was put out by BBC Sounds. Really enjoyed it. And it was either, I can't remember exactly, it was either 6 or 8 episodes. That podcast was only ever supposed to be let's say it was 6 episodes, just for argument's sake, it could have been 6 or 8, but that podcast was only going to be that amount of episodes long. That podcast did not fail but it wasn't set up to be a weekly podcast that was going to be going for years years years. It had a limited run, like a limited run TV series. So what we're basically saying though is that because it didn't make it past 20 episodes, that podcast failed. It didn't. It delivered its job. It was only there for a limited run and this is why it really irritates me when people are like oh, you know, there's, like, all these podcasts that have just completely failed because they don't make it past 20 episodes. Actually, what we don't consider is how many of those failed podcasts don't make it past 20 episodes, how many of them were never intended to get past 20 episodes. And, again, I listened to another podcast earlier in the year. I completely forget what it's called now. But, again, it only had, like, 8 episodes in it and it was only ever intended to be a limited run-in that in that way. So I personally hate this measurement because it bases itself on this weird rule, which I don't know who came up with, but it's this weird rule that if you haven't got past episode 20, then your podcast has failed, which I just think is an absolute load of rubbish because there are some very successful podcasts out there that never made it past episode 6 or 8 but that was their intention, they were only supposed to be almost like a, you know, how you have TV series that only go for, like, 3 episodes or whatever? Doesn't mean the TV series failed, it just meant that it did its job and we're not having a go at that for failing in any which way. So I personally hate this statistic because with the lazy girl's guide to podcasting it is considered that lazy girl's guide to podcasting is a top 1% podcast using that statistic, but I think that the measurement is completely skewed from the outset because you're setting it off against every other podcast that didn't make it past episode 20. But, actually, you're not considering how many of those didn't intend to ever make it past episode 20 in in the first place. So that is how the lazy girl's guide to podcasting is both a top 50% podcast and also a top 1% podcast. Just to throw this into the mix as well though, lazy girl's guide to podcasting is also a top 10% if you use the metrics as per listen notes. Listen notes uses 2 different scores in order to rank your podcast, but one of those is its global rank. And what listen notes does is it ranks your podcast in comparison to and I need to read this out. See what we've got. It looks at the data of 3,397,948 podcasts, and it then determines with your downloads where you rank in amongst those just over 3,000,000 podcasts. Again, I'm not really sure what I think about this particular statistic when you consider, well, how many of those podcasts are defunct, how many of them were limited run podcasts, how many of them, like, never really got off the ground and were just trailers and what have you. But according to Listen Notes, using its algorithm, its system, whatever you wanna call it, for working out a global rank, lazy girl's guide to podcasting is a top 10% podcast. Circling back to the overall topic of this episode, this is why I think that podcasting statistics are complete BS because they don't mean anything. I can turn around to people and say I'm a top 1% podcast. I am a top 1% podcast because I produce more than 21 episodes per year. However, the person who's listening to me is looking and considering a top 1% podcast using the buzzsprout statistics and that you need over 4 and a half 1000 downloads within the first 7 days of an episode's release to be considered a top 1% podcast. I think that that's really, really it's just really I don't know. It's not dishonesty. It's not about Verity, but I just think it's it's the whole idea of fudging the statistics, isn't it? And I just often think that when I see people saying things like, you know, I'm a top 1% podcast, top 10% podcast, like, great. What metric are you using in order to balance that? Because, as I said, if I say I'm the top 1% podcast, that suddenly sounds so so impressive. And, I mean, I, guested on a podcast once, this was a little while ago, and because I had more than 21 episodes per year, the host actually introduced me as this is Verity Sangan, she hosts a top 1% podcast but to me I was like am I a top 1% podcast though? Because that's just using that one metric. It's not looking at other because, as I said, if you use the buzzsprout metrics, lazy girl's guide to podcasting is a top 50% podcast and if you use the listen notes we're a top 10% podcast. So I guess what I'm saying is rankings and percentage rankings and podcasting statistics, they are useful, but when it comes to the percentages, I think that sometimes when we see things online about people saying I host a whatever percent podcast, I think we just need to be really honest with what that actually means. There's a reason why, and I'm not saying that I won't do this in the future depending on how I feel, but there's a reason why I don't say on my instagram, for example, I host a top one percent podcast because I there's just something about that where I just don't feel like it's completely honest because it's like, well, what metric are you using in order to define that percentage? And I think there's just there's so many different metrics. There's no one global metric really to say this is where you sit from a percentage point of view because I think it's just, as I said, it's just it's so difficult because normally when figuring out these metrics you're being compared against every single podcaster out there, you're not being compared against the active podcast about the limited run shows, the defunct shows, all the rest of it. So I think that it's an odd I think it's an odd one and I guess what I'm saying from it is if you are looking online and somebody is saying oh you know I can make you a top 1% podcast, I can make you a top 5% podcast, I can, you know, or even I host a top whatever it is podcast. Just delve into that a little bit deeper and be like, what do you actually mean by that? If you're saying because I get these all the time. I can make you a top 1% podcast. I can make you a top 5 whatever percent podcast. But what do you mean? What metric are you actually using? And equally when people are saying to you, oh, but I'm a top whatever podcaster. That's great. That's amazing. I'm not taking that away from anybody. But if you're hearing that and it's actually putting you down and it's making you feel really rubbish as a podcaster, just maybe just well, what what metrics are you using to determine that? You know, if it bothers you that much, obviously, if it doesn't bother you then whatever. I think the main takeaway that I want anyone to have from this episode is that my podcast is a top 1%, a top 10% and a top 50% podcast depending on which metrics and which statistics you look at. There's nothing right about any of those. There's nothing wrong with any of those. I can advertise myself as either a top 1% or a top 50%, top 10%. I don't actually need to advertise myself as any of them if I don't want to. But the point is is that I just think that a lot of these systems are completely yes because they don't really mean anything at the end of the day. And also just because you put out 21 episodes and you become the top 1% podcast using that metric, doesn't mean the podcast episodes are any good. You might only be getting, like, 2 downloads per episode. Don't stress about the percentages for your podcast. I hope that you have found this useful as ever. Wherever you are listening to this episode, be it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, literally wherever, make sure that you are subscribed and that your settings are also set so that every time we put out a new episode it automatically downloads that episode so that you get to listen to the goodness as soon as possible. Otherwise, I'm Verity. This is The Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting, and I will see you next time.