Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on a podcast statistics system for the RawVoice communities Blubrry, PodcasterNews band TechPodcasts. The system can also be completely re-branded for companies who want to use the media download statistics for their podcasts.
Podcast Statistics are a very important part of the Podcasting business. The download numbers are very important, not only as a way for the producer to gain insight of their audience size, but they are also used as a means of making money. Most podcast advertising today is based on allotments of 1,000 downloads, referred to as CPM. If someone offers you $5 CPM and you have 10,000 downloads of your podcasts, you would make $50. The CPM in this example is just that, an example. Actual CPM rates range based on the popularity of your show, the content it targets and the demographics the advertisement targets.
We were fortunate to work with download statistics for a very popular podcast, one of the top 10 on iTunes. This podcast alone has an audience size of roughly 1/2 million per episode. Having this data, I was able to truly test and optimize the database and programming logic in order to quickly create the reports. The first version of the system took 15 minutes to update. The updates now take between 60 to 90 seconds and include the totals for country demographics, software clients and operating system platforms.
If you want to see what I have been working on over the past couple months, check out the Blubrry Podcast Statistics page.
I am pretty excited by the outcome of the Statistics system. I have many people to thank, especially my wife for her help and support.
