Sometime this morning between about 7 and 8am Eastern US time, this podcast crossed a major milestone.... the 100,000th download occurred!
Now in the world of "mainstream" media this is a trival number that would hardly merit attention. But in the new and emerging medium of podcasting, I, for one, will celebrate that milestone... especially for something that is admittedly as niche of a topic as "VoIP security"!
To look at it another way, we've put out 74 shows since we started about 1.5 years ago. That works out to an average of 1,351 downloads per show... for a show that averages 45 minutes in length!
That there are that many folks interested in our show and topic continues to be a very humbling fact. It's an honor for us... and a responsibility that we don't take lightly. We know that just as easily as you have subscribed and downloaded our show, you have an amazing amount of choices out there and you can just as easily go elsewhere.
Both Jonathan and I THANK YOU for your continued support and participation! We have been delighted by the community of listeners and contributors that has grown up around the show and we do look forward to the continued growth of that community and to reaching many more milestones in the months and years ahead. Thank you all.
Read on if you have interest in statistics...
Addendum for stats geeks (like me): You will notice in the image above that I have included the "raw requests". These stats come from our hosting provider, LibSyn, and reflect the fact that a certain percentage of downloads start but then don't complete or, I guess, make duplicate requests. It could be due to connectivity issues... software errors... or other reasons. It's interesting to me that it's about 11% of requests that LibSyn filters out.
I also find it interesting to see the division between podcatchers and direct web downloads - and the slight skew toward web downloads. "Podcatchers" are where the listener has subscribed through the show's RSS feed. The web downloads are direct from the site, either by download or by the embedded Flash media player. Given the increasing ease-of-use of podcatchers like iTunes, Juice and others, I find it intriguing that there are slightly more direct downloads than subscription downloads (52% download versus 48% podcatcher).
I'd be curious to know if this distribution is similar for other podcasts as well or if it reflects some of the other marketing we do. We post notices about new shows to the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, which also winds up on the front page of the VOIPSA web site. Additionally, and I think this may be a larger reason, we post to the VOIPSEC mailing list, which has something like 3,000+ subscribers. We've heard of a lot of people finding the show through VOIPSEC. I've also discovered over time that there are a lot of folks who, after learning of the show, go back and listen to a lot of the back episodes. We know also that the fact that we post detailed show notes does have an impact because web searches will return our podcast episode pages for common searches on VoIP security terms and also VoIP companies.
Actually, in looking at the stats for individual recent episodes, the distribution there is more like I would expect - about 60-70% podcatcher and the remainder direct downloads. So perhaps the overall tilt toward downloads really does reflect people exploring the back catalog through downloads, either as new subscribers or through finding it via search.
Thoughts from any other stats geeks or podcasters?
Comments