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Podcast statistics

February 18, 2014

I know little blog, you are not getting the attention you deserve. Neither is the are-you-ok device. I’m spending a lot of time working and a lot of time with my podcast.

Speaking of my podcast, several people have recently asked for statistics on the listeners. It would make more sense if said people were offering me money (i.e. sponsorships) but because the podcast is sponsored by our consulting company (Logical Elegance), I haven’t bothered to figure out how to make sponsorship work. And if it is this annoying, I may never bother.

Anyway, I decided to sit down and figure out the statistics. And write a paper-let for potential non-sponsors. (Why? Why? I really do have useful things to do but this is what I did.)

Determining traffic is very difficult, particularly as producer Chris and I do the podcast as a hobby, not as a business. However, I’ll try to give you some ideas to help you decide if this is a good media outlet for you.

embedded.fm stats

This is our traffic to embedded.fm over the life of the podcast. Most people hear about the show and visit embedded.fm.

However, once they’ve heard about the show, they use a podcast app to listen regularly, such as iTunes, Instacast, Stitcher, or Zune. For the ones that use RSS (iTunes, Instacast), libsyn provides the statistics of episodes downloaded. (Zune and Stitcher are used by less than 5% of listeners.)

libsyn download stats

I find the graph a little hard to read, though the orange trendlines do show a week-to-week consistency. Looking at the monthly numbers, you can see that there was a bump in November when Jeri Ellsworth’s show came out (and my show was mentioned on The Amp Hour).

 

Year-Month Month Year Total Downloads
2014-01 January 2014 4,160
2013-12 December 2013 3,558
2013-11 November 2013 5,700
2013-10 October 2013 2,216
2013-09 September 2013 656
2013-08 August 2013 608
2013-07 July 2013 507
2013-06 June 2013 383
2013-05 May 2013 122

 

Geographically, the listeners come from around the world, though mostly English speaking countries.

Listener geography

 

Looking at a few specific episodes, the numbers depend on many factors. I don’t know what they are, some of it is guest promotion but a large part is simply how interested the market is in the topic.

Episode 36: Drive your boat with a Wii mote. Saleae founder talks about the Saleae Logic

Episode 36: Drive your boat with a Wii mote. Saleae founder talks about the Saleae Logic

Episode 29: Ducking the Quadcopter. Microgen Systems VP of Engineering talks about energy harvesting.

Episode 29: Ducking the Quadcopter. Microgen Systems VP of Engineering talks about energy harvesting.

 

Episode 26: The tofu problem. Deeply technical discussion on internationalization of embedded devices.

Episode 26: The tofu problem. Deeply technical discussion on internationalization of embedded devices.

Episode 23: Go for everything I want. Jeri Ellsworth talks about CastAR and Valve.

Episode 23: Go for everything I want. Jeri Ellsworth talks about CastAR and Valve.

Finally, I can’t speak to the specific breakdown of the audience, from the emails I receive, it is primarily hardware and software engineers.