Average Listening Time as a Podcast Metrics

Transcript

building an indie business in the centre of venture capital I'm Alex Edmonds and this is the building an indie business podcast dun dun okay um today I wanted to discuss metrics and specifically one metric time spent listening and I'm gonna go over why that is a better metric than downloads how to find this metric what can you do with this information why it's important what can be done to get this to be a more common metric and problems with it okay before we get into it I wanted to discuss the survey I have so last week I announced the survey for the podcast and it's just to get an idea of what you guys like to hear on the podcast and what you guys want to hear so you can tell me anything that's missing from the podcast or any episode ideas that you want to hear from me and then we'll do an episode on them later so I will put a link to that in the show notes okay so let's get into it why is time spent listing a better metric than downloads because first of all downloads is a vanity metric it's not accurate so a podcast counts as downloaded when it just goes into someone's pod cast app it doesn't actually measure if someone actually listened to the podcast episode time spent listening actually measures if people are listening so it'll take the average of all the lessons that your pot your podcast or the podcast episode has and it will create an average out of that so if your 3 hour podcast is downloaded a hundred times but the time spent listening is 10 minutes people aren't listening to that your podcasts and downloads will not tell you that so how can you find this metric well it's not a standard metric so you have to go to each individual platform and it will show you your time spent listening per platform so you go to Apple Analytics you have to go to Spotify stitcher has this also and all the others ok what can you do with this information the first thing you can do is you can place things you need people to hear based on your time spent listening so let's say your podcast is 20 minutes and people stop listening after 10 minutes and you definitely want people to say I hear that you want people to rate and subscribe to your podcast but that at the beginning don't put it at the end if you have advertisers you can charge more based on your time spent listening so again if you have a 20 minute podcast and people will listen 10 minutes charge your advertisers more for the first 10 minutes if people are leaving early figure out how to catch their attention before they leave so if people are leaving after 5 minutes in your 20 minute podcast figure out a way to get them to stay for longer have an attention-grabber have like a cliffhanger something that makes them want to stay the next thing you could do is send out a survey create a survey ask people why they're leaving we'll ask them why what can get them to stay and then change those things around for your podcast okay the final thing that you can do is ask for reviews and what these reviews will do is that the people will say oh this podcast is great but I can only listen a half of it because dot-dot-dot and then you can fix your podcast based on what they say it's kind of like the survey but a little different okay so why is this important well the very first reason why it's important is because it shows how underdeveloped the podcast industry is it's a common metric on other platforms on YouTube it's called average view duration and I'll get into YouTube a little later and talk about the time spent listening on YouTube okay the next reason why this is important is because it's a metric that can help podcasters improve their content okay what can be done how can we get time spent listening to be a standard metric in the podcast industry okay one thing you can do is contact your podcast host and ask to include the metric in your podcast analytics the next thing you can do is get podcasting new sources to write about it by getting podcasting news sources to write about time spent listening podcast hosts will see that people want this metric and they will figure out a way to provide the symmetric okay um just talk about it it'll create chatter about the metric and it'll new sources will write about it and then podcast host will read it and then they'll figure out a way to include it the next thing you can do is ask venture Tablas for a bunch of money to create the solution yourself yeah right okay so why downloads is used instead of time spent listening well the first thing is is because downloads is easy to track yeah you it just every time the the RSS feed is hit then you know someone downloaded your podcast the next reason why downloads is used is because it's an easy standard if you if there's a ten minute podcast and there's a three hour podcast they have different time spent listening no matter what so it's kind of hard to track which one is the better podcast based on time spent listening ok um problems with time spent listening the first problem is that it gives you an average number thirty three percent of your listeners finished ninety nine percent of your podcast okay so it would be kind of hard to track the changes in the time spent listening because if you have a lot of listeners a new episode might not change your time spent listening so much so if the episode is bad and people turn it off sooner you might not be able to see that another problem which I kind of already went over is that it's not a standard metric and you have to go to individual platforms to check this out check out this this metric so it's kind of hard to track because each platform may have a very different time spent listening so your time spent listen on Apple might be five minutes Spotify seven minutes stitcher ten minutes and so it's kind of hard to gauge whether people are listening okay it'd be difficult to implement because of RSS so RSS it just the downloads are pinged it'll ping the RSS feed and that's how it's tracked so it's one ping with a what time spent listening the RSS feed will have to be pinged the entire time someone is listening so that would be hard to change because that's very different from how RSS works right now okay so what's a better solution or how can you track this right now I would do overall downloads plus time spent listening so you have a hundred listens and thirty-three percent of your listeners finished 99% of your podcast well you have thirty three listeners not a hundred okay that's it for now thank you for listening if you are interested in hosting your own episode of the open podcast community podcast come to the telegram chat which will be linked to in the show notes and I can help you with that the advantage of the open podcast community podcast is that you don't have to go through the hassle of setting up a podcast I've already done that you just need to send me the audio file and tell me what you want in the show notes and I'll launch it to the open podcast community podcast and I can post a link to the to the podcast in the show notes because it's now released I have released three episodes so the trailer my episode about the open podcast community podcast and an episode where I interview Brendon Weinstein okay thank you for listening have a nice day bye