I hear Leo talk a lot about how subscriptions drive the trending boards, but i hear a lot of other podcasts stress reviews and how reviews help them get discovered. does anyone know the specifics of how these all effect the shows?
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We see a big bump in downloads when we’re featured on iTunes or Stitcher.
The fact that we don’t even show up in the Tech section of most Discover tabs doesn’t have anything to do with popularity. None of these systems rank downloads, in every case they’re based on recent subscriptions.
With 7,000 new podcasts every week discoverability is our biggest challenge. Tell your friends about TWiT, and make sure to subscribe. It really helps.
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I even subscribe to the ones I don’t watch. Doesn’t cost me anything and helps out a very little bit.
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I didn’t think of this. Do you think there is a downside of this is a wide practice? Messing with analytics?
Maybe I am weird - but while I messed with a podcast program or two, I found that I just prefer to go to the TWIT site and manually download the ones I want.
Very few people recommend it or even mention it, but I just love Downcast on iOS. It plays video for one. Downloads what I want automatically. You can set global rules for how long to keep podcasts or when to delete them but you can override an individual podcast if you want. Nice gestures for skip ahead (sorry Leo, but I can’t listen to another Rocket Mortgage ad) and skip back. And you can define how many seconds the skips take too. AND you can sync it through iCloud though I do not. Video casts go on the iPad, audio on the phone.
Doesn’t subscribing imply that the podcast app will download episodes of content? If you have no intention of watching/listening, but you’re still pulling those downloads, there is a cost to your bandwidth utilization as well as for TWiT’s bandwidth utilitzation to serve it up to you. It’s unclear to me if this is actually help? Comments @Leo?
@PHolder, subscribing does not mean downloading unless you have your app set to auto download. I have PocketCast set to never auto download, so I have to manually do it due to not using my phone for every episode, or not wanting to watch/listen to that weeks show.
Subscribers are not viewers/listeners, so it may help get shows noticed, but is indirectly driving views that advertisers look for at best.
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