This American Life

Stats: Statistics are produced by Simplecast, Chartable, Podsights and Podtrac to help This American Life to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. Simplecast, Chartable and Podtrac are IAB v2 certified.

Tracking and attribution: Chartable and Podsights or their partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - they may spot a device that downloaded an episode of This American Life later visited the website of an advertiser; or they may track that a device that listened to This American Life also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.

Dynamic content insertion: Simplecast may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. This American Life may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.

This American Life is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.

This podcast uses a unique RSS domain. This podcast is the only one that we’re aware of which uses a domain of www.thisamericanlife.org for its RSS feed. Domains are always visible to anyone who can see your internet traffic - your internet service provider, employer or even your government - even when you use HTTPS connections. If your podcast app uses the RSS feed directly, you can be tracked as a listener to this podcast every time your phone checks for a new episode.

Here’s more about insecure links and unique domains.