Why Looking At Your Podcast Stats Might Cause You To Change Your Show — Even If Your Download Numbers Are Great

Paul Colligan
5 min readMay 31, 2020

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It’s a better show for everyone when you look at the numbers.

The Launch

In August 2014, the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie was still popular at the movies and the 24-hour news cycle was constantly reminding us that Ebola had claimed its first thousand casualties. This was also the month JJ Virgin launched her Podcast.

It all started here

At launch, the show hit #4 in all of iTunes. It was popular from day one and was mentioned twice in Apple’s end of the year round-ups.

The show was a success by all accounts, garnered millions of highly reviewed downloads, and sparked significant industry recognition.

The Reboot

Five years later, in October 2019, the Podcast was relaunched under the name Reignite Wellness. All past episodes were re-edited for dynamic ad insertion (which will always be read by JJ). The reboot expanded on the interview format and added additional episodes of shorter content with JJ as the solo voice.

Why move to dynamic ads?

One of our fundamentals at the Podcast Partnership is the goal of “assets, not episodes.” Don’t create something that’s fine until the next episode — create something that’s great for the next ten years.

To put this into perspective, Seinfeld recently rented his 30-year-old television show to Hulu for half a billion dollars. That’s not a bad model to follow at all.

Assets, not episodes.

Every month we track what we call the “New Content Ratio” — the number of new content downloads divided by the back catalog episodes also downloaded during a given time.

JJ has a very low New Content Ratio — which means that in any given month, her audience is consuming more past assets than current episodes.

All the ads facilitated by Libsyn Pro

With dynamic ad insertion, we can easily slice new ads into the old assets/episodes with ease and strategic focus. If they keep playing the old episodes (which they do), these new ads will face a greater audience every month.

They’re inserting new ads into Seinfeld’s thirty-year-old assets over at Hulu. We figure that’s a fine model to follow.

We started inserting ads on everything across her inventory. Now instead of 20% of the downloads working for her in any given month, 100% of the show is now working for JJ.

Why change from a proven interview format? If it got the attention of Apple — and millions of downloads, you must have been doing something right?

That was easy. That one interview episode a week was a lot of effort — but we could easily add simpler content to the mix and track what happened.

Reboot 1.0 Numbers

Almost immediately, the reboot goals worked as planned. With the back catalog in play and the new episodes continually adding to the asset list, we were seeing 5 times as many ads running than current episodes downloaded on any given month.

But that wasn’t the entire story.

When we looked at the consumption numbers of the new season, we found something interesting. The interviews were being consumed to standard industry numbers of 50–60% but, more importantly, the new season 2 episodes featuring only JJ were being consumed in the high 90s. Oftentimes we’d see episodes with a consumption rate of over 100%. Wowza.

Maybe it’s not all about the interviews …

In short, her audience was more interested in what JJ had to say than in hearing JJ interview others. For the solo JJ content, they were listening to the end of the episode. Many times they clicked the rewind button to listen to concepts again — even with the ads.

Once we connected the dots we realized that the interview episodes, which took the most work to produce every week, were consumed the least. The shorter/simpler episodes not only had the content nearest and dearest to JJ’s heart, but they were also the ones the audience wanted to hear the most.

In retrospect, this shouldn’t have surprised us.

I know interview shows are all the rage, but I wonder if many of them have considered/tracked the variances / looked at the numbers and acted on them.

The smart podcaster looks at the numbers and evolves the show to see the best results. Internally we call it the Profit Response Machine. Others just call it good business.

Reboot 2.0

Today we take the next step in the evolution of the show. This weekend the show was rebranded as “Ask The Health Expert” with a new, even simpler format. Every episode is simply a health question, asked by the audience, and answered by JJ.

It’s JJ being JJ to an audience that loves her — giving them the information they want. It’s pure asset content and it’s easy to produce.

Now Five Days A Week …

And we’re now doing it five days a week.

More episodes — more assets — more ads.

Want to hear it in action? Ask The Health Expert at Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google.

Because it’s under 10 minutes, and the perfect format for it, we’ll also launch this as an Alexa Daily Briefing once we make sure all the elements of this relaunch went well.

What about those interviews that all the cool kids are doing? In a few months, there will be some “guest” health experts, but the questions will still be asked by JJ. Her voice, her topics, her audience, her win.

Reboot 3.0?

When does it all stop? When will we be happy with the format?

We’ll continue to monitor all the numbers we can for this show. If they tell us how to make the show better, we’ll adjust again.

Does JJ, or her audience, deserve anything else?

Do your podcast numbers deserve a second look?

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