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April 2021: Podcast Traffic and Income Report

There was a lot of news in podcasting in the last month with announcements from Apple, Spotify, and Facebook.

I’m not going to get into the big picture of the ramifications of the announcements, but rather how it will affect me and my plans for the podcast.

Subscriptions

Part of my business plan was to one day eventually offer some content as part of a subscription. The original idea (before these announcements) was that I would offer it via Patreon.

Either I would make 2 episodes per week available to subscribers, or I would provide 2 extra episodes a week to subscribers. I wasn’t planning on doing that until I had enough revenue coming in to hire writers.

I don’t think that the announcements from Apple and Spotify will really change anything other than making it more accessible. It will probably mean having to do more work, but it also might mean more subscribers.

I’m hoping that my host, Libsyn, will provide backend tools to make it easy to managed everything from one backend.

I’m estimating that I probably won’t pull the trigger on sponsored shows for at least six months, if not later.

Also, until more information comes out, it will be difficult to really know what to do.

Facebook

This hasn’t gotten as much attention, but I think this will be a bigger deal for me, at least in the short run. It opens up a huge marketing channel for podcast promotion that didn’t exist before.

One issue with podcasts is that they can’t really go viral. There is no share button on podcasts. However, if embed players are integrated into major social media platforms, that will change the game for podcasts.

I especially think it will be good for shorter-length shows such as mine. Listening to an hour-long show on a Facebook page might be a stretch, but 7 minutes is very doable.

Traffic

April was a really good month.

I had 99,533 downloads for the month, just a hair below 100k.

This was a 35% increase in downloads over March 2021, and slightly more on a daily basis when you factor in April having one less day.

It is hard to attribute where the new downloads came from. I had one video on TikTok go viral which might have had something to do with it.

I’ve also continued running ads on several podcast apps which I think is probably responsible for most of the success.

Revenue

I don’t have much to report this month because almost everything was either front-ended in March, or back-ended in May.

I will say that I’ve gotten a small bump in sales from my Travel Photography Course, which I made several years ago. I’ve been running ads for it on days when I didn’t have any inventory sold.

My big goal for May is to sell out my inventory every day of the week. Because I’m still not at a level where I can join a large podcast network, I’ll have to cobble this together by hand. However, all that revenue can be plowed in to growing the show even faster.

By Gary

3 dimples. 7 continents. 130 countries.