One neat thing that most modern podcast hosts have added to the analytics you have on your podcast is what devices or players people listen to your podcast on.
On Transistor, the host we use for all our podcasts over at goodstuff.network, it’s presented as a “Popular Apps – The most popular apps your audience listens with”:
We have a variety of podcasts at Goodstuff – a show for U2 fans, a podcast about baseball, adults reviewing kids movies, podcasts about podcasts – but I assumed that all the shows on our network would have listeners with the same methods of listening, more or less.
<cue dramatic music swell>
I was wrong.
Popular Podcast Players at our Podcast Network
There are a lot of variables that could affect how someone might listen to the shows on Goodstuff, such as:
- Style or topic of show. (i.e. Tech focused vs non-tech might favour custom apps vs using built in apps or web version)
- Hosts with varying social media following
- Start date of show. Some have been around longer than others.
- Stats not being reported properly due to the fact that podcast stats aren’t an exact science
Here’s how 8 shows on Goodstuff compare with their popular podcast players stats:
Baseline 
Clockworks 
Daily(ish) 
The Goodstuff Morning Show 
I Guess We’re Grown Ups Now 
Show Me Your Mic 
Way Too Seriously 
The U2 Podcast
A few observations:
- Two of my own shows, Daily(ish) and Show Me Your Mic, have a lot of Web Player usage.
- Not every show has been submitted to Spotify – or was only recently added to their directory. So Spotify stats might be off because of that.
- Some shows have more of a iOS focused audience or host(s) while others are more Android friendly. If someone shares a show within an app like Overcast, which is iOS only, it might have a larger audience there because hosts with Android only just can’t share within the iOS ecosystem.
What Should You Do with Your Podcast Stats?
So what? Should this affect how we market or publish our shows? What does the fact that Show Me Your Mic has a lot of web player listens vs The Goodstuff Morning Show’s popularity with Overcast listeners mean?
I don’t think anyone should be hyper focused on their podcast stats – spend more time recording and refining your audio than staring at stats please! It is worth looking at your stats every now and then to see if people are listening where and how you assume they are. For example, you might be surprised to find out you have a huge audience on Spotify. That might lead you to figuring out that someone with a large audience blogged or tweeted about your podcast and linked to your Spotify feed instead of your website.
In our case, we might want to consider changes to our website if that’s where most people are listening to a show. We might want to encourage folks to us an app to subscribe if we think they might not know how. Or maybe we could throw some other marketing efforts for other shows on our individual episode pages to draw listeners of one show to another show.
Show Me Your Stats!
I’d love to hear, via the comments below or on Twitter, what players are most common or popular among your podcast subscribers. Are you surprised by what you see or is it exactly what you expected to find?
