Podnews in the Bumper Dashboard

For the launch today of The Bumper Dashboard, a measurement tool that combines podcast data from a number of different sources, we were kindly given access by the team for our two main podcasts, Podnews Daily and the Podnews Weekly Review.

Here’s what we learnt.

Like everything Podnews does, download data for our shows is public. We use OP3 for stats for Podnews Daily and stats for Podnews Weekly Review - and it shows our download data in a number of ways.

The Bumper Dashboard ingests this data too, alongside the more detailed listen data from the three big podcast app dashboards: so we can see all this data directly in one place.

Here, for example, are the verified listeners on each platform for the Podnews Weekly Review. We’re not especially popular on either platform (podcasters tend not to use them), but the data is still helpful.

On June 7, we released a new episode, leading on the announcement by Spotify that it was to recertify under the IAB. You’ll see a lot more listeners on that platform that week than we normally get. And it was reflected in the total time-spent-listening numbers, with a big jump on June 9:

Incidentally: these numbers also highlight that a weekly podcast isn’t always listened-to on the day of release. The Podnews Weekly Review (released on a Friday) appears to be listened-to over the weekend, with the main dips happening during the early week. But if you just looked at our downloads, it’s much more spiky, with a big peak on release dates.

Digging into the data a little more - here’s an episode from back in February:

Spot the jump at 22 minutes in: you can see a clear jump in audience on all platforms. Podnews Weekly Review uses chapters: and they’ve jumped through to listen to, in this case, our interview with Oskar Serrander. What’s pleasing is that this jump appears on all platforms.

You might notice, above, that the show has a low retention level - it’s a long show, after all. The Podnews Daily - running at about five minutes long - has a rather better retention level. Here’s Monday’s episode from a week ago:

… it clearly shows that YouTube behaves very differently. By only 30 seconds in, we’ve lost more than half our YouTube listeners - Podnews Daily is a static image. Indeed, every listener had gone away by about 3’30”. It’s a very different listener experience to the others: where most listeners stay until the end.

The Bumper Dashboard is available as a free tool for Bumper’s podcast growth customers. In any case, all this data is available to anyone, in Spotify for Podcasters, Apple Podcasts Connect and YouTube Studio.

But it’s revelatory to see it overlaid on one another, and to have one place to check the performance of a podcast.