Podcast Progress Report

I keep looking at statistics on downloads to try to get a picture of the effectiveness of my podcasting efforts. There are some problems with my website statistics service, but here's what I've been able to figure out.

Total downloads (website statistics) have increased each week:

• 5/21 -5/28: 20
  
• 5/28-6/5: 205
  
• 6/5-6/12: 253
• 6/12-6/19: 479
• 6/19-6/26" 492
  

This last week (6/19 - 6/26), Drawn2Jesus had a total of 265 downloads while Retire2Serve had a total of 227 downloads.

The new podcasts for the week had the highest number of downloads for the week:

• D2J 6/20: 56
• R2S 6/20: 59
• D2J 6/23: 55
• R2S 6/22: 35

Total downloads for particular podcasts tend to rise with time. The 6/6 and 6/9 D2J podcasts have totals of 116 and 119 downloads while the 5/30 and 6/7 R2S podcasts have totals of 98 and 78. (When I switched to a more detailed stats package, I apparently lost some early data.)

The other way I have to look at statistics is through Feedburner. It provides the number of downloads through the syndication feed on a daily basis -- i.e. when someone has subscribed through iPodder or some other aggregator and it hits the Feedburner RSS feed to download mp3 files. So looking at that on a weekly basis, here are the results (Date range; D2J, R2S, Total):

• 5/21-5/28: 56, 45, 101
• 5/28-6/5 : 76 , 66 , 142
• 6/5-6/12 : 83, 67, 150
• 6/12-6/19: 104, 76, 180
• 6/19-6/26: 89, 88, 177

These numbers do not indicate whether one file or all files were downloaded -- the aggregators give people a choice of downloading only the last podcast or catching up on all of them.

So, looking at all of this, I'm somewhat encouraged. People are finding and listening to the podcasts, and the number of people listening weekly appears to be increasing, whether they are getting the podcasts through subscriptions or going directly to the blogs and listening from there.

I'll keep watching the numbers to give me feedback on how this experiment is working.