January was a very good month. Arguably the best month the podcast has ever had.
Overview
- I moved my podcast host from Libsyn to Megaphone.FM. I did this as close to midnight on New Year’s Eve just to make the data as clean as possible. (More on this below).
- The reason why I moved podcast hosts had to do with joining a podcast network. I signed with AirwaveMedia. My business plan basically involved signing as soon as possible with a network that checked certain boxes. This was so I can begin bring in in revenue ASAP so I can begin revinesting that revenue in marketing to grow faster.
- I had a massive spike in downloads which began around the middle of the month. The spike can almost 100% be attributed to Castbox.
Traffic
A very good month. Because of the change in hosts, I had to combine the numbers from both hosts for the monthly total.
Megaphone = 259,595
Libsyn = 6,788
Total = 266,383 downloads
What is odd is that even though I turned on the redirect in Libsyn on January 1, I’m still getting a trickle of downloads on my Libsyn account.
The downloads are spread across different user agents. The only way I can think of how people are still downloading shows on Libsyn is that they haven’t refreshed their RSS feed in their player. Even today, February 1, I still got 32 downloads on Libsyn.
This isn’t that big of a deal in the big scheme of things, but it is odd and it says something about podcast consumption.
What it says about podcast consumption I’m not sure.
Castbox
The biggest change in downloads came from people using the Castbox app.
At the beginning of January, I had about 220 subscribers on Castbox. At the end of January, I had 21,000.
I have checked every day, but I haven’t been featured as far as I can tell. Almost all of the downloads are coming from outside of the United States.
Why would everyone be listening on this single podcast player? How did I get a spike in downloads on a single player without being featured on that player?
I don’t know the answers to these questions yet, but I’d like to get to the bottom of it.
Here are my daily downloads from Castbox over the last month:
One nice thing is that I can now purchase advertising on Castbox, which requires 1,000 subscribers on the app to be eligible.
Dynamic Ad Insertion
With my move to Megaphone and signing with a network, I am now running dynamically inserted ads into my back catalog.
I only have everything set up through last October. I have over 500 episodes so getting it set up for every old episode is very time-consuming. Especially considering I have to go and remove most of the ads I previously ran which were just affiliate ads.
I don’t have any data regarding how well it is monetizing yet.
I’m either going to have to find time to convert all my old shows, or I’ll need to hire someone.
Promotion
I ran ads on Overcast and PodcastAddict this month. There are still a few more days to go on the Overcast app, but the acquisition cost per subscriber so far has been $2.11.
I basically watch Overcast ad prices every day and just wait until prices drop far enough to make it worthwhile.
The PodcastAddict ad converted at $3.30 per subscriber. The ad ran under the Education category, which usually doesn’t perform as well as history for me.
Next Month
Assuming the traffic increase I had in January continues (and so far it has just kept increasing) I should hit 300,000 downloads in February.
Where I’ll invest next to market the show is up in the air. It might be Castbox or Player.FM, neither of which I’ve advertised on, or I might invest in a feed drop on a large podcast again.
