Your podcast hosting company doesn’t know if it’s an automatic download or a user-initiated download. Or, audio can be downloaded when a listener wants to hear it - a “user-initiated download”.
To a podcast hosting company, that looks the same as a download: because it technically is.Īudio can be automatically downloaded to your phone, in case you want to hear it later. We use the word “stream” to convey the action of pressing play on a podcast you’ve not downloaded yet. In podcast analytics, no audio ever “streams”: the audio is always downloaded. Total audience numbers cannot be accurately worked out from downloads.A listen, or a play, is when we know a human being has pressed the play button.A download is just a download of an episode.Downloads vs streams vs plays vs listens vs audience numbers Here are some details about how the different figures work, and how to read them. But, podcast statistics can be confusing and complex. It’s always nice to look at the numbers to see how your podcast is doing.
