Don't Get Ahead Of Yourself

The other day, I saw an animated discussion of podcast listenership measurement on Facebook. There were podcast producers, most of them new to the medium, debating the merits of the IAB with some of the prominent hosting company leaders, and it was interesting on a theoretical basis, but....

Really, unless your download numbers are in five figures per episode, just walk away from that for now.

Seriously, if you're not doing -- well, some sales folks insist that it has to be 50,000 downloads per episode, some will drop that to 25,000 or 20,000, you aren't going to be getting the kind of advertising where those numbers matter. You're more on the level of finding a local advertiser who's looking either for direct results measured by people buying stuff or looking to support a local creative type (you) for the prestige and civic duty. The ins and outs of measurement, whether it's the IAB's efforts or Nielsen or Podtrac or whoever, are not going to matter to you yet. At some point, perhaps soon, the measurement problems will go away and there will be a sanctioned, audited measurement standard. In the meantime, you have a host, the host can tell you how many downloads you have, and that should be enough for your purposes.

In other words, have patience. Build your show up and don't worry about those numbers until the download numbers you see on your host are big enough for you to look for sales representation. Your sales rep will handle it from there on out. Focus on what you CAN control, which is the quality of your show. The numbers will follow.

Got a question about podcasting? Go ahead, send it to psimon@allaccess.com or tweet it at @pmsimon. That's what I'm here for.