Podcast Downloads Matter Less Than You Think

So the topic of downloads comes up a lot for podcasters or any business owner who’s thinking about getting into podcasting, or even more likely, who has been podcasting for a while and seeing that number is either not changing very much, not going up fast enough, or possibly even going down, and they’ve been podcasting for a little while.

And that can be stressful. Podcast downloads are a lot of things, and it’s important to be aware of them. You want to keep an eye on what your download numbers are. It tells you interesting things, but it doesn’t tell you a lot of really meaningful information about your business and how the work that you’re doing with your podcast is impacting that business.

And as a business owner, that’s the most important thing. That’s what you want to be paying attention to. So when we think about what podcast downloads can actually tell us, they’re the number of people who effectively have listened to at least a minute of an episode on one of the podcast platforms (not counting YouTube or any of the social media sites).

And that’s good to know. It can let you know what your reach really is, broadly speaking. It can let you know if you have a particular topics that are really interesting to your audience or if you get a really big uptick. Cool. More content like that. Or it can let you know who’s sharing your episodes.

There’s tons of information in downloads. Good to know. But they don’t tell you how much money you’re going to make next year. And so when you are thinking about what to track, yes, downloads should be on that list of things to track. But there are better, more important ones you should be worrying about as well. And if the other metrics such as – new referral partners that you meet, new clients that you sign, the length of your sales cycle or the number of conferences you’re invited to speak at – are all going up, but your downloads aren’t – that’s fine.

Because you’re getting what really matters for your business, and that’s actual business outcomes that are going to move the needle for your business over time. The time that you want to pay attention to downloads and when that is a really meaningful statistic or metric for you to be tracking, is when there’s a direct relationship between the downloads to something else.

So for example if you did want to get sponsorship for your show, or if you had a funnel where you know that a certain number of podcast listeners are absolutely going to join your email list or your membership community. You’ve done the work on that. You’ve done the attribution. You know that 100 downloads means two new members of the community.

If you know that, then absolutely pursue downloads, because you’ve got a real reason to think that more downloads is going to mean more success of other kinds for your business. Similarly, with sponsorship, if you know that you’re going to get $100 for every thousand downloads, absolutely pursue more downloads really aggressively and make that an important part of your strategy.

But if you are like most business podcasters and you’re getting other things out of your podcast, like relationships, sales or labor cost savings, that’s what you should be tracking and treat the downloads as just some interesting information that guides your content making decisions.

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