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OP3
The Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) is a free and open-source podcast prefix analytics service committed to ope...
Data and analysis
The Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) is a free and open-source podcast prefix analytics service committed to ope...
Data and analysis
Stories
May 3, 2024:
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OP3’s John Spurlock is interviewed by Castopod. The tool gives public, comparable data about podcasts - here’s data from some of the shows using it, and here is data for our daily podcast. It’s free; Podnews is a monthly financial supporter (and you, big podcast company, should be too).
April 22, 2024:
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Open podcast analytics service OP3 has added a new API and renamed one. They’re also looking for translations.
April 11, 2024:
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Data newly available from OP3, and published by our sister publication Podcast Business Journal, shows that “the big three” podcast apps (Apple, Amazon, Spotify) account for 74% of all downloads for the over 2,000 shows measured on the service. CastBox is the biggest independent podcast app at #4; the data is updated daily.
April 8, 2024:
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Wondering how other podcasts like yours are doing in downloads? OP3 analytics are open to everyone, and our sister publication the Podcast Business Journal publishes a selection of podcasts measured by the service, to help you compare.
April 1, 2024:
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Rephonic is now displaying verified numbers from open analytics service OP3, if a podcast has the prefix installed. You can also claim a show by adding the OP3 prefix to it.
February 26, 2024:
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However you look at your podcast stats, this is probably cooler. Above, Spencer Walker-Fooks has built a little e-ink display to show his latest podcast downloads (and his investments, too). It uses the OP3 API.
February 19, 2024:
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In France, the third edition of the 180-page Podcast Magazine has published, including an interview with John Spurlock of OP3, Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland, and Greg Pouy, a French pioneer of podcasting. The glossy publication is available for around US$25 including postage. Vous devrez parler français pour le lire – mais bonne nouvelle, vous le savez!
February 13, 2024:
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Castopod explains some of the technical aspects of podcast measurement, and highlights OP3 as a potential solution.
February 5, 2024:
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Hosted by Stanford Strategic Communication lecturer Matt Abrahams, Think Fast, Talk Smart discusses real-world communication challenges to provide tips and tricks to help hone and develop your communication skills. The Webby award-winning show (which is measured by OP3) has just hit 42 million downloads, we're told.
February 1, 2024:
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RadioPublic is to close at the end of March. The public benefit corporation launched in 2016, asking podcasters to support an investment round in 2018. It offered podcast websites and had a listening app. After it was bought by Acast in Feb 2021, our news archives show the disappointing story of what happened next. OP3 reports it currently has a 0.003% share of podcast downloads.
January 11, 2024:
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OP3 has enabled a new “listen time” metric for selected shows, including the Podnews Daily. It uses value4value’s streaming sats feature. Here’s the data for Podcasting 2.0 - a show that’s a little longer. ;)
January 8, 2024:
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John Spurlock posted data from OP3 showing total downloads from Spotify and from Apple Podcasts. A significant dropoff is visible for Apple Podcasts since Nov 1.
January 2, 2024:
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iOS 17 is now being used by 75% of Apple Podcasts listeners, according to OP3’s open data. The iOS 17 changes have resulted in, overall, a 5-6% drop in share across all shows.
December 25, 2023:
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OP3 is a great option if you want open analytics.
December 22, 2023:
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OP3 posted a correction to some download calculations, following a fault. We’ve reset our cached data in our podcast pages.
December 21, 2023:
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If you wonder how other people are doing with their podcast downloads, our sister publication the Podcast Business Journal has links to over 300 shows who are sharing their download data using OP3.
December 8, 2023:
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The OP3 open podcast analytics project has announced its founding sponsors. They are: Transistor, Rephonic, Flightpath, Podium and Podnews. Thank you for supporting us, so we can help further the industry; and please consider joining us in supporting OP3’s open, accurate analytics.
December 4, 2023:
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OP3 reports that by the end of November, more than two-thirds of all unique listeners using iOS were from iOS 17. For much of the month, though, it was just over 35%; so December may give us even clearer indications.
November 20, 2023:
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Our New Podcast Trailers podcast feed - here's the RSS - uses OP3 to measure total plays (and individual shows see these downloads in their stats, too). One thing we learnt: make sure your audio enclosure URLs end ".mp3", even if they're just, like ours, redirects. Apple needs an audio file extension in the URL, otherwise it won't index the episode.
November 13, 2023:
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John Spurlock has published all useragents for YouTube Music's RSS playback feature, which we covered on Friday. The user-agents are part of the shared opawg user-agents-v2 repository, and will now be measured by OP3.
October 26, 2023:
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Wondering how other podcasts like yours are doing in downloads? OP3 analytics are open to everyone, and our sister publication Podcast Business Journal publishes a selection of podcasts measured by the service, to help you compare.
October 2, 2023:
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OP3 now measures more than 900 shows. The free podcast analytics tool puts your data (and its code) in the open, for 100% trustworthy analytics. Here are the stats for the Podnews Daily.
September 14, 2023:
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The better tools he's demanding? OP3, which is open and free; here are our stats and those of many others. We'd agree that an API into Apple and Spotify's proprietary data would be useful, though.
August 14, 2023:
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Adam Curry's Boostagram Ball value4value music podcast has, so far, sent over $1,191 to music artists, he says. We note it's had 6,249 downloads so far; so that's $0.18 per download, or an equivalent of $185 CPM.
July 31, 2023:
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A third of all podcast requests to open podcast analytics service OP3 are from IPv6 addresses, according to John Spurlock. (Most podcast hosting companies don't support IPv6, however, due to issues with download measurement.)
July 24, 2023:
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Over 700 podcasts are now participating in the Open Prefix Project, including ours. The service offers free and open podcast analytics - here are our stats, and here's a list of some others.
June 30, 2023:
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Android is still highly fragmented for podcast apps, according to data from the Open Podcast Prefix Project, analysed by Podnews. Data from 4.75mn downloads in May suggests that, while Spotify is the clear leader, the app ecosystem on Android remains significantly more fragmented than that of Apple - even when combining downloads from iOS, iPadOS and macOS.
June 19, 2023:
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It's a few months since Apple removed "AppleCoreMedia" as a useragent of its app. The results? Apple Podcasts download figures are up 4%, says OP3. We predicted 6%.
May 11, 2023:
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So, you have a comedy show: but what kind of downloads are other comedy shows doing? OP3's open podcast analytics service is measuring hundreds of shows; the Podcast Business Journal's data section is now listing more than 150 of them, so you can compare your show with others.
May 5, 2023:
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Want some more numbers? The Podnews Daily podcast did 70,427 downloads in April on podcast platforms; and got 653 views on YouTube (an additional 0.9%). More than Spotify, though - it might be the biggest podcast platform by reach, but we had just 492 "starts" according to the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard.
April 3, 2023:
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Open podcast tracking tool OP3 grew its share of tracked episodes by 11.5% last month, and is now at #13. Podtrac remains #1. And, Amazon Cloudfront remains the most-used CDN.
March 27, 2023:
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Because Mozilla's new podcast, ThunderCast, publishes its listening data in public, we can see what podcast apps its listeners are using in its OP3 page. The partially open-source Pocket Casts is #1 with 27% of all downloads; the wholly open-source AntennaPod is second, with 22%.
March 22, 2023:
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ThunderCast is a new official podcast looking at the making of Mozilla Thunderbird, the company's email app. It's measuring its downloads on OP3.
March 10, 2023:
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Our article on how to understand podcast stats has been updated to remove retired analytics data from Google Podcasts, and to add OP3 data.
February 28, 2023:
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Open podcast analytics service OP3 has released show stats pages, with download data, podcast platforms, countries and more. Podnews links directly to them, for any show which uses OP3 like Podnews Daily, Everything Everywhere Daily, No Agenda, Pod Chat or Buzzcast. The release also enables additional API calls.
January 16, 2023:
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Podcast analytics service OP3 has published its methodology of calculating a download, and John Spurlock has published more on why prefix analytics aren't always identical to logfile analysis, particularly a different method of dealing with range requests. Major prefix analytics companies we've spoken to, including Podtrac, say that they have similar solutions in place.
January 13, 2023:
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Open podcast analytics service OP3 has published its method of calculating downloads, including links to code. It also highlights an important difference for analytics prefix services.
January 2, 2023:
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ICMYI, if you're using OP3 for analytics, John Spurlock is testing a new show stats page. OP3 is now monitoring more than 300 feeds.
December 30, 2022:
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If you're using the open podcast analytics platform OP3, John Spurlock is offering "top secret links" for shows using it. We have one. It's very exciting.
December 19, 2022:
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Captivate supports OP3, and has done for a while. (Many other podcast hosts let you type in prefixes yourself; "support" means additional UX to help you add services like this).
December 12, 2022:
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Podlove, podCloud and Castopod have joined Transistor in supporting OP3, the open analytics service.
December 5, 2022:
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Want to pull OP3 redirect logs for a specific day via PHP? Here's a Gist to do that. Don't laugh at our Editor's poor PHP code.
November 14, 2022:
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A new user-agent lookup list has been produced by John Spurlock. Based on both OPAWG and Buzzsprout's implementations, including web referrers, it's a specific and highly-detailed useragent, device and OS detection list for podcast analytics. Here is the current repo and discussion: if you're running a podcast hosting company, would this data help enhance your stats and/or simplify maintenance?
November 10, 2022:
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Open, transparent alternatives for download measurements proposed by others have included ODL from Podsights and OP3; alternatively, RAD from NPR and the podcast:events tag could measure plays, rather than downloads. Here's much more on podcast stats.
November 7, 2022:
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John Spurlock has been evaluating useragent lists for OP3, and has tried both OPAWG and Buzzsprout lists.
October 24, 2022:
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Open podcast analytics service OP3 now returns Country, Continent, Region, Timezone, Metro and ASN. Here are some example requests for the Podnews Daily podcast.
October 20, 2022:
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Open prefix analytics service OP3 has added a setup page, a prefix argument for a show's GUID, and introduced API key management. Our OP3 useragent snapshot now uses our own API key; and the Podnews Daily podcast now includes the GUID. (Undocumented: the redirect-logs now includes the referer when present).
October 10, 2022:
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How many "unknown"s do you see in your host's podcast stats? Using live data from OP3, the OPAWG useragent list is less than 5%…
October 3, 2022:
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To improve the open OPAWG useragent list, Podnews has produced a live tool that uses the data to give the apps used for 1,000 OP3 audio requests.
September 26, 2022:
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Open podcast analytics prefix service OP3 has added trailing wildcards to its API. (Here are Podnews's last 100 downloads, as one example). The project has also added a full privacy policy.
September 16, 2022:
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The Open Podcast Prefix Project has been quietly launched by John Spurlock. It's a prefix analytics service committed to open data and listener privacy; and places listener data in the open. It could power trending and popularity data; or give independently-verified stats to advertisers.
August 22, 2022:
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How many podcasts are still in production? A surprisingly small number, according to research from Amplifi Media and Podnews. (Amplifi Media's Steven Goldstein is at Podcast Movement)
August 13, 2020:
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Who's the #1 podcast in the US? Media Monitors has released their US top 25 podcast ranker - Edison Research released their own earlier this week. Both are based on audience recall, and measure 'people' rather than 'downloads'; Media Monitors uses research undertaken over two weeks in June, while Edison Research's study took 12-months, ending June 24). Both have The Joe Rogan Experience at #1, and The Daily at #2, but 40% of the shows in the top 25 don't exist in the 'other' top 25.
August 11, 2020:
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Edison Research has published a top 30 US Podcasts ranker. Called "the only podcast ranker that covers the entire US podcasting industry", it claims to measure shows by reach ("people"), not downloads; it's based on online interviews with over 8,000 weekly podcast consumers over a near 12-month period ending in June. We've published the full list.