It’s been a little while since I added to the series on podcast metrics. We’ve already gone over some of the usual statistics such as downloads, subscribers and bandwidth that give you an idea of the size of your audience. But there are a myriad of other statistics, beyond the size of your audience, that help determine the overall value or success of your podcast.
How Would Your Podcast Sell For?
Let me ask you this question: if you were to sell your podcast today, how much would it be worth? Answering this question is an interesting way to measure the current success of your podcast.
Recently I talked about selling your podcast as a way to make money or as an alternative to podfading (letting your show fizzle). Along the same lines, I found an interesting post on selling a blog. Everything in the article applies to podcasts as well.
A List of Criteria for Determining the Worth of a Podcast
One of the most interesting things to be gleaned from this post is a list of criteria that a buyer might want to know in order to determine the value of your podcast. Whether or not you’re planning to sell your podcast or blog, there’s a lot to be learned by watching these criteria over time to track the increasing (or decreasing) value of your site and content.
Here are the items I’ve picked out from the article and my own experience.
- Current income sources
- Average monthly income
- Income history/trends
- Sales
- Monthly traffic (i.e. unique visitors, page views, etc)
- Traffic history/trends
- Recent traffic spikes from important sites
- Amount of search engine traffic
- List of which keywords are bringing in the most traffic
- # of inbound links listed in Google
- Types of inbound links (are there some from quality longterm sites)
- # of feed subscribers
- Feed subscriber history/trends
- Google Page Rank
- SEOMoz.org’s PageStrength
- Technorati ranking
- Type of blogging platform
- Alexa Rank
- Age of the site/blog
- Number of posts
- # of email list subscribers
- Past press coverage
Engagement Metrics
I’d also add engagement-type stats such as:
- Average # of comments per post
- Average length of a visitor’s stay on site
- How many times has content on your site been bookmarked on a site such as del.icio.us
- Statistics on specific actions taken by readers/listeners (i.e. email optin, video streaming, clicking an ad link)
Track the Value of Your Podcast
Whether you’re interested in selling your podcast or not, each of these criteria is worth watching in order to track your overall success as well as the increasing (or decreasing) value of your site and content.
You might not need to look at all the items listed above, but depending on your goals you should outline a set of metrics that will give you a regular snapshot of how you are doing. Some metrics you might want to check weekly. Others you might just check monthly.
What have I missed? Is there anything else that you watch in order to track the success of your podcast?
NOTE: For now I’m going to leave the metrics series at that. We’ve covered a good podcasting stats foundation. Though, I could teach a full day course on the subject. So I’m sure we’ll return to the subject eventually.
March 8th, 2007 at 11:45 am
I’m reading your blog two weeks late while surfing around the web for insights into stats on Podcasts.
That one point is interesting as there is likely some value that can be gleaned from being able to do stats on old entries and seeing what information is still useful to people over time.
Anyhow, I’ll admit that I’m new to all of this but find it very interesting. I was curious about the metrics that come from individual IP hits. Do web servers have a way to distinguish users behind a firewall that all share one external IP? I ovten wonder about this since you and 20 friends at work can each subscribe to a podcast individually and potentially be considered one hit.
On another note, I’m curious how technologies like torrents might affect the overall landscape of statistical research? If people begin subscribing to a podcast but your outbound bandwidth is minimized by having another subscriber feed the episode to the end recipient do all my metric tools go away?
March 8th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
ImListening,
You have hit upon a couple of the important limitations in podcasting metrics. It’s good to measure unique downloads by IP in order to avoid inflated stats, but there is the risk of under-measuring….for example in the case of a corporate firewall.
If the stats package is sophisticated enough, I suppose there are some things that could be done to mitigate this. You could watch for different OS and browser combos hitting the file and make some other guesses as to when it might be more than one person accessing the file.
When it comes to bittorrent, I think all bets are off. You save on bandwidth, but your stats are a mess.