How do you measure the size of your audience? Is it the # of people who download your episode? Is it the # of people who consume each episode? Is it the number of feed subscribers? What about the people who download the file directly from your site?
Can you see where we run into problems with the semantics? We’re going to take a look at some words and stats used to measure the size of a podcast’s audience and what each term really means. In this post I’m going to discuss the "hit" myth.
Since the dawn of the world wide web, the term his has been misused. People often think hits to web page are synonymous with visits. A hit is simply a request from a web browser to get a file or information about a file on your web site.
A visit to a single web page results in several hits (e.g. one for the HTML file, one for each image on the page, etc.) Similarly, a browser or podcatcher might hit a podcast file (MP3 or other) more than once in the process of a single download.
Looking at the # of hits to a podcast file (MP3 or other) does not indicate how many times the entire file was downloaded. Some of those hits are the result of simple requests for information (such as the file size) or partial downloads. Further, if someone starts a streaming player, but stops listening ten seconds into the program, it still results in a hit to the file in the logs.
The number of hits to a file will always be much larger than the actual number of unique complete downloads. You need to be careful about using the # of hits to an episode of your podcast a measurement of your audience size.
Bottom line: The number of hits to a file will always be larger than the number of people who actually downloaded it completely and the number of complete downloads will always be more then the number of people who listened to the whole episode.
We’ll discuss downloads in the next installment.
November 21st, 2006 at 3:25 pm
The biggest issue is creating a standard. Podcasters need to come together with the aggregators, podcast listing services, hosting companies and advertisers to agree on a standard by which we can all be reasonably confident in the numbers. I’m not in this to artificially inflate my numbers and I spend too much time explaining the numbers I give (complete downloads) and why they are the best I can come up with.