Dan Misener: How Many People Really Listened?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Every morning from 2016 to 2022 I would wake up in the morning and check my downloads for this podcast. I was obsessed. Why were they up? Why were they down? Over time, that activity got replaced by Wordle, and I learned to take a larger, big picture view of my stats by examining other things like 90 day periods and consumption. I learned that downloads don't necessarily mean listeners, and they definitely don't tell you who actually heard the ads. Dan Meisner from Bumper joins me today to unpack podcast metrics. He has actively been working to go beyond the download, along with his partner, Jonas Woost. He and his team have built the Bumper dashboard, a tool that pulls in data from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, your hosting provider, op three, if you use it, and many more, and it turns all of that into something creators and advertisers can actually use things like time spent, people reached, and their new metric, the bumper score, which shows how many of your downloads are turning into real human listening, and if you want to experience this for your own show, full instructions on how to hook up your podcast to the Bumper dashboard are on the episode page right now at Sound Off podcast.com And now Dan Meisner joins me from the headquarters of Bumper Media in Toronto. I'm quite excited, by the way, about the Bumper dashboard, you know, going public. You've let me play with it now for a couple of years, I think you were one of the earliest users, and certainly one of this was one of the first shows that was ever

Dan Misener  1:48  
hooked up to it, certainly outside of our active client base, and yeah, this was a big deal this month, making it more broadly available, and there's a remarkable thing that happens when the price goes to free, or at least there's a cut down version that's available to everybody for free, like we have seen more people signing up in the last week than any time in the history of this software product, which is still pretty short, right? It's been around for two years, but remarkable what the word 'free' can do. It's nice to have a free tier. I mean, sometimes these things go away, but I think something with metrics. I think people are curious, and they want to try, and especially now the timing is really good, because I think people have worn out of the download and want something a little bit more, and I think we've seen enough heat in this area, right, whether that's conversations at conferences or whether that's what Dan Granger at Oxford Road recently put together in terms of the AMP task force with some of the big playback apps actually seemingly willing to cooperate and maybe even align on if not standards, then at least conventions. I think it's kind of exciting, and beyond the download conversation, we've been beating that drum for a while, and it's nice to see more people talking about it, and I think there's no one single contributing factor. It's a lot of things all happening at once, not the least of which is growth of consumption on platforms that simply don't generate downloads. I think we've set enough bait and hook right now to sort of ask, why should somebody sign up for this? I mean, we launched the bumper dashboard, and the original promise was don't check five different dashboards, get it all in one place. The pitch was sign up and have all the numbers you care about under one roof, which lets you have a bird's eye view, but also lets you harmonize across different services. Right, what Apple calls a play is different from what Spotify calls a play is different from what YouTube calls a view, so sort of an aggregated and unified version of this, and that's still, I think, a useful part of the bumper dashboard, is that sort of unified view across at least the three big podcast consumption platforms that deliver publisher-facing insights alongside hosting providers and other data sources, but the I think the real reason that many people are coming to the Bumper dashboard today is not just for that aggregated view, getting all the numbers in one place, but it's for this thing that we've introduced called the Bumper Score, which is a way of really understanding the delta between podcast file delivery, which is much more of a technical measure, and podcast consumption, which is really to do with did my files that were downloaded actually get played back, and when people hit play, did they make it deep enough into the episode? To reasonably encounter an advertisement, and so we rolled out this bumper score, which is a way of kind of quantifying that gap, and then comparing shows to one another, and in order to make that bumper score available to as many people as we could, there sort of needed to be a free tier, and so we've seen a lot of people coming in for that piece of it as well, so this podcast has a bumper score of 33 Are we the lowest? No, the bumper score is a scale, right? It's effectively a percentile rank, and the score goes from zero, so there's a show that's got a zero all the way up to 200 and there's a show that's got a 200 100 is the median, that is sort of the industry average, and all that's doing is taking every single show that we have measurement access to, and that is participating in the bumper score, because this is an opt-in thing, right? You can sign up and choose to participate or not, so among all participating shows, where are you in the line from most of your downloads get played and most of that playback yields somebody encountering an ad?

Dan Misener  6:11  
Where are you on a scale from zero to 200 And so what did you say your number was 3333 and that takes into account all of the data that we've got access to, so when you hooked up the bumper dashboard, you hooked up presumably the hosting provider, you hooked up Apple, you hooked up Spotify, you hooked up YouTube, and really what we're doing is we're comparing what the hosting provider tells us in terms of how many downloads were technically delivered. How many files were transferred from them to somebody's device, and then comparing that to what we can verifiably say got played back, because Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, of course, all have that data, and they report it back to publishers, so it's really a way of understanding the difference between a technical measure of file delivery and what actually gets played back, because I don't know about you, Matt, but I follow a lot of shows. I wake up in the morning, and I've got a playlist of eight daily news podcasts. I don't listen to eight daily news podcasts every day. I wake up in the morning, I look at what's most interesting to me in those episode titles, and I hit play on the one that I think is gonna work for that morning, and so I might be downloading five or six or seven episodes that simply sit unlistened on my device, and so really the bumper score is a way of sort of figuring out, mostly for ad-supported shows, and shows that are looking to attract sponsors, not just can we transact on how many files were transferred, but can we transact on almost like a quality score, how many of the files that I got transferred actually reached a person, how many of them got played back, and how many people didn't skip through the ads, so with a score of 33 Not since I wrote SATs have I felt this particular way of inferiority. The good news is there's always room to improve, unless you're at the very top end of the scale. And what's interesting about the score, because we've sort of rolled it out over the past couple of weeks, is that it's a benchmark, right? It's comparing your show to every other participating show, and so the numbers move around in part based on who else is participating, right? So, if shows that are doing worse than you join the pool, your number goes up, and if shows that are doing a better job of actually reaching an audience with advertising material, join, then your score might shift down. The other thing worth keeping in mind is that the bumper score pays close attention to the recent past, so we're really just looking at the recent past couple of months worth of episodes, not the entire history of your show, not all the way back to the beginning. Episode one, we're looking at the last three months, and we're looking at episodes that have been in market in that sort of last three month period that have been around for at least a week, they've had some time to cook, they've had some time to actually accumulate audience, and so as we move through time, and all of us, I think, are moving through time. That window of what episodes are being considered changes, so we have seen sort of the numbers change and evolve, and that's in response to, did we make good episodes, did we make strong episodes? What was our ratio of Apple downloads to Apple playback, those kinds of things, which, of course, shifts every single day, we're looking at a different rolling window,

Matt Cundill  9:44  
and I think this is the reason why I keep coming back. I'm a creator, and I really do feel this is for creators, but you've mentioned advertisers too, so I think you've built this for both, right?

Dan Misener  9:53  
I think we need both, and I think the big beef that our team at Bumper has had with the status. Quo is that it doesn't serve creators especially well, right? The unit of transaction in podcasting, I think, for so many years has been the download or the ad impression inserted into a download. It's largely been a download-derived metric, and we tend to talk about the download almost like a currency, right? We can buy and sell against it, we can transact on the download, but even for non-ad-supported shows, Bumper works with nonprofits, Bumper works with brands who don't have any advertising in their shows, the download has almost become not just a unit of transaction for ad sales, but it's, it's almost become the yardstick for success, or it's, it's an important number that people look at, and I really don't think that that serves creators especially well, because you know, speaking as somebody who has made shows myself, and I identify as a, as an independent Canadian podcast creator, right, my goal was never really downloads. My goal was to reach people, and my goal was to reach people who would choose to hit play, and ideally hit play and spend some time with me. And I think a lot of the work that I've done over the past couple of years has been trying to help people focus in on people, playback time spent right, the kind of measures that have been around for a long while. I think about broadcast measurement, right? I talk about people in playback, that's region frequency, really. It's not so different, and none of that is captured in a download figure, right. And I think we've seen technical changes in podcasting over the last couple of years, whether that's the rise of YouTube, right, a platform that never generated a download for anybody, or Spotify, and their desire to sort of cut the download out of the loop by encouraging more people to publish video, which ceases downloads in many cases, and we've seen, you know, Apple make technical changes to the way that automatic downloads happen. We've seen the IAB continually refine what the definition of a download is, and alongside of that, we've had platforms - I mean, not so long ago, I think it was just last week - Spotify changed the definition of a play, right? So, we've got all of this sort of, I'm gonna say, podcast measurement jargon that seems to be always in flux, and one of the reasons we built the bumper dashboard was to try and get us and think particularly of creators back to the fundamentals, the stuff that tends not to change so much when Spotify snaps their fingers or Apple snaps their fingers or the IAB comes out with a point revision on what the download guidelines are, and for me that is, you know, if I'm a creator, did I reach people this month? Did I reach more people this month than last month? Did they hit play more this month than last month? And did they spend more time with me and my show and my guests and the stories that I wanted to focus on this month over last month? Now that that's captured in a download number,

Matt Cundill  13:00  
so Radio in the USA, they started qualifying listening at five minutes, and they would call that 15 minutes, but then they said, "Let's cut it down to three minutes to see what happens, and what happens is you get, I think, somewhere, I think it was like 47% more magical listening, and then the suggestion came out this morning from somebody who works at it's actually John Momola, who works at Barrett Media, he was writing, maybe radio should go to 30 seconds, like Spotify. I mean, Spotify calls it a play at 30 seconds, that really doesn't tell anybody any story, really, because you could hit play and hate the first 30 seconds and leave, and somebody thinks they've won. Yeah, we, when we look at time spent, right, because we get that number from Apple, we get it from Spotify, we get it from YouTube, which I think in most North American markets is near or more than three quarters of podcast consumption. Apple, Spotify, YouTube - the three big ones, right? Between them, each platform reports back on

Dan Misener  14:00  
total hours spent, I get total hours per day, I get total hours per week, total hours per month. I really like dealing in those large aggregated numbers, because that's something you can't fake, it's something you can't juke. I can't compel you to spend 30 minutes with me, I can't compel you to spend an hour to listen to my show, and to your point, Matt, around sort of minimum listening thresholds to count as a view. I think that can be a helpful signal, but I am way more interested in those aggregate numbers. Did we have 1000s of hours of listening yesterday? Did we have 10s of 1000s of hours? Did we have hundreds of 1000s of hours of listening that you can't fake, and that requires sort of sustained opt-in, not bailing after the first 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds. So, yeah, I think we can quibble, and nobody's ever going to be happy with any definition of a minimum listening threshold in order to count. As a play, or a view, or a start, or a stream, or insert your favorite synonym here, but when we bumper are looking at the time spent numbers, we tend to look at the big aggregate numbers, and then we can do other things with those, like divide them by the number of daily active, weekly active, monthly active listeners, and in fact, something that we just rolled out recently in the bumper dashboard, which I hope you get a chance to look at, is on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. What is the average number of minutes per listener per day per week per month? And the funny thing is, Matt, when you look at that, you can really use it as an effective barometer to figure out if you're marketing your show. Did I get in front of qualified listeners? Did I get in front of qualified audience? Because if you get in front of a qualified audience with your marketing message, and you can bring a net new listener into the show, well, then your average time spent per listener is going to stay pretty stable, because you're reaching people for whom your show is a good fit, or you offer something of value, or they're more than likely going to be interested in hitting play and sticking around for all or most of the episode, but if you simply get a whole lot of one and done drive by sample for 30 seconds and then bail, well, that totally depresses your average time spent per listener, and you can look at that over time, and you can look historically and see how have we done. There's this constant reach and engagement trade off, right? Bring more people in. How many of those people are qualified? How many of those people are likely to actually spend meaningful time with you, and how many of them may have been tricked or duped into hitting play, and that's where I think the minimum listening thresholds can be really, really helpful, because up until very recently Spotify's play metric had no minimum listening thresholds, so if you were in the Spotify app and you scrolled through and a static thumbnail lingered over it a little too long, it would spring to life and start playing. Our understanding is that counted as a play. That to me does not feel like meaningful user intent. Oh, I lingered over a thumbnail, and then it came to life and started playing automatically. I think the minimum listening thresholds, whether it's 60 seconds or 30 seconds or three minutes or five minutes, they're meant to control for auto plays and other similar playback events that don't necessarily have a whole lot of user intent behind them. So I'm not going to understand anything unless I can see it all, which is why I've paid $50 a US for the Sound Off podcast to see all the data from all 507 episodes that we've recorded so far. So, what additional stuff am I going to get for my 50 bucks a month? So, the bumper dashboard, the free tier, you can sign up, you can connect all your data sources, connect Apple, Spotify, YouTube, your hosting provider.

Dan Misener  17:57  
There are a few other data sources that you could hook up, and out of the box for no dollars for a $0 fee that gets you the bumper score, and it gets you a view into the recent past, and so you can see 90 days, basically three months worth of data, and the reason that we set it that way is that three month look back window that we're using for the bumper score, so you get your bumper score that costs nothing, and you can see the past three months worth of data at the show level, and it gets you the past three months worth of episodes that you've published, right? And so that costs nothing, and if you want to get the full history, you want to go all the way back to the beginning of time, all the way to the beginning of your back catalog paying gets you unrestricted access to historicals, and it also gets you access to some of the more complex derived metrics. So, we've got a whole section built up around what we call loyalty, right? Average number of episodes per listener, per day, per week, per month, lifetime loyalty scores some of those sort of derived measures that don't really show up in any of the parent dashboards, the Apple, the Spotify, the YouTube dashboards that we've done the calculations for. It also unlocks some features that are maybe more relevant for networks, so if you've got a single show, I think you're really well served by the free tier, right? Just like, sign up, don't pay us anything, get your bumper score, look at the recent past, and call it a day. I think that should be useful. I hope it's useful for creators, especially independent creators. But if you're running a network, if you're running 10 shows, if you're running 20 shows, if you're running 1000 shows, we've got some additional features that let you basically do show by show comparisons, you know, show A versus show B. How are they performing in terms of people playback time spent? And so there are some of those more kind of network level or enterprise features that aren't available at the free tier, but we're happy for people to pay to get access to. So I remember that wonderful talk.

Matt Cundill  20:00  
You had at the London podcast show in 2025 I know you gave two talks this year. I'm sorry I did not see those, but I heard those were great too. But in 2025 you're talking, you got us together and we spoke about the download and you know its limitations in how it can be applied. I was going to put up my hand and say it, and I think I waited for somebody else to say it. Maybe nobody said it, but I sort of felt that unless Apple or Spotify come on board with this, nothing was going to change, because, like you mentioned, they do represent so much of the downloads. So, in your quest with you and Jonas Bumper, and what you're doing, how do you feel standards get created for this business in this industry? Because I sometimes feel it's the advertisers. What they gravitate to is what we're going to be using. I think the folks who write the checks have an awful lot of say, and historically have driven much of the, and I'm hesitant to use the word standards, because there aren't a whole lot of standards, true

Dan Misener  21:00  
standards in this sense, but I look at the efforts of the IAB, right, and the specific group of folks there who put together the guidelines, and I'm going to use that word guideline, not standard guideline. Look at what the A in IAB stands for. Last I checked, it's advertising, right, and if you look at who is on that committee, who is on the group that puts those guidelines together, nearly everybody is representing the interests of ad buyers or ad sellers in some way. Right, so I look at the IAB, I look at what Dan Granger at Oxford Road put together with this AMP task force, which I think was unveiled publicly just this year, and I think caught a lot of people's attention. I think you're absolutely right. If a lot of shows are funding themselves through sponsorships, or through direct ad support, or working with one of the programmatic marketplaces, or one of the hosting providers that also happens to be ad sales representation, yeah. If you write the check, then you get to, I think, make demands and ask for maybe even demand better quality data. And I'll tell you, Matt, at Bumper, a couple of months ago, we got together, we brought together a group of people, we had a meeting in New York, and some of the biggest ad buying agencies in the world, not just the podcast specific ad agencies, but the big hold goes, the folks who have staffs of 1000s who buy not just podcast ads, but they're buying Super Bowl ads, and they're buying bus shelter ads, and they're buying all kinds of stuff, right, the kinds of folks who advertise consumer packaged goods, right? We had folks representing very, very large advertising budgets in the room. We heard something remarkable from the ad buyers, which was first off, the brands they represent want to buy podcasting often. There is a passionate advocate at the brand who uses podcasting in their daily life? They've got their own favorite shows, they've heard the ads, they've maybe even responded to those ads. They know it works. So, there's a passionate advocate, some CMO, or somebody working in a marketing organization inside a large company. There is will to invest in podcasting, and at the agency side, the agencies that represent these brands, there's a willingness and an appetite to buy, because they know it works, and so what will happen is a brand will make some kind of investment in podcasting based largely on the excitement and the still, I mean, nearly 20 years in relative shiny new factor, right. And then what comes back in terms of data does not lead to trust. It does not lead to increased investment. We heard at this meeting from big ad buyers, we want to buy this, the clients we represent want to buy this, but the data story is just not where it needs to be for this to be on the menu in a meaningful way, and yeah, maybe you're going to get some test buys, and maybe you're going to get some experimental budget, but to have this sit alongside the regular Meta spend, the regular Google spend, the regular sort of billboard program, or linear TV program, or fast channel program, that they're doing, the data's got to get better, and not the data getting better for the sake of data getting better, but the data's got to get better to engender trust, to prove out to the buy side that this stuff works, so yeah, I, this is a very long answer to your question. I think the folks who hold the checks absolutely have a lot of ability to speak into the lives of those that they're buying ads from, and I would say on the buy side, and our colleague Miriam at Bumper buys a lot of podcast ads, she spends nearly all day buying. Buying podcast ads, she's been demanding better data from the vendors that we work with, because what we care about at the end of the day is not how many impressions you served, we care about how many people did you reach.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  25:11  
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Matt Cundill  25:45  
Yeah, so some further proof to the download being dead, and that's spending a half hour of your Monday morning answering questions from a client. Why did I get 1274 downloads from Vietnam over the weekend? And it's all browser, who actually wasn't the only podcast that got it, two of them got it, and I've seen it in, I've seen the Buzzsprout Facebook group, I've seen this everywhere, where they're getting this traffic from Vietnam, so I'll write my host, in this case the host was Megaphone, and I said, what's this about, and I got the answer I thought I would get back, which is, well, these are IAB certified downloads. They do count. They're real, and I'm like a lot of people in Vietnam did not wake up all of a sudden wanting to listen to this particular health show or this particular show about cryptocurrency or the Sound Off podcast, either, for that matter. So, and I don't think they're wrong if they are in fact IAB certified downloads, then they're downloads, and there's no such thing as a fake download, right? If somebody's device requested the file and the server delivered the file, last I checked, that counts as a download. It's not a fake download, it just may not have had

Dan Misener  27:00  
listener intent or a real person behind it, and I think you're hitting on such an important distinction that I wish more people were thinking about asking about, and frankly demanding better answers to, but right now, Who is incentivized to right size that number? The hosting providers, and I understand the position they're in. Well, there's a set of guidelines for how they measure downloads. The set of guidelines was established by people who buy and sell ads, right? And what's the incentive for them to share a smaller number, or a more conservative number, or a more rigorously filtered number? Well, they don't care, they're perfectly fine, because likely some ads got delivered to Vietnam and heard by no one. And I think if I was a hosting provider, many of the hosting providers charge a fee, sometimes it's a flat fee, sometimes it's a pay per use fee, and I think about, you know, the bandwidth costs, and there's been so much conversation about, you know, the cost of serving podcasts, especially as we think about HLS video, whether that's through Apple's system or the more open alternate enclosure way of doing it, right, lot of conversations about hosting providers, and so again, if there are lots of downloads and the hosting provider is charging you a fee based on the amount of bandwidth you're using, the number of file transfers that are happening, or the number of HLS requests that are happening. Who is incentivized to make sure that number is smaller and maybe more representative of the actual site? And so this is one of the things that we're trying to do with the bumper score is not get to some ultimate place where we're transacting on just verified impressions, but to better understand, okay, if I buy 100,000 impressions from you, how many of those are likely to reach a person, and then you and I, that's maybe the beginning of a negotiation, right? So I can ask you your score. You can tell me your score. Maybe I can demand your score, or I can say, 'Hey, Matt, I'd like to buy ads on your show. Would you like this check? The condition is you need to share some more detail about the actual consumption of your show, and you've referenced your number earlier. I don't think that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think that's a useful piece of information for two parties who might want to transact, and you asked a minute ago about standards. I think one of the things that we're trying to do with the bumper score, in fact, what we're trying to do with our dashboard more broadly, we're not trying to create standards. Standards are slow, they take a lot of people, there's a lot of consensus, so many different interests, competing interests, in many cases, I love standards. I think it's important for standards to exist. The beauty of what we're trying to build with this score is it need not be a standard. You and I can both just look at the data, and we can negotiate as two parties, and I can say, "Here's what I'm willing to spend, and you can say, "Here's what I'm willing to sell. And we can agree with no industry body having to write a white paper in order to make that happen. Yeah, I mean, I got so addicted to ratings when I was in radio that when I met somebody from a radio station who didn't use ratings, I said, "Well, how do you determine what to sell it for? And he just looked at me and said, "Well, the price is the price. And I said, "What do you mean, the price is the price, he goes well. The price is the price, and that's what it is that you're going to have to pay to be on Golden West Radio in Steinbeck, Manitoba. We've seen versions of this in podcasting.

Dan Misener  30:30  
Again, my colleague Miriam buys a lot of podcast ads, and sometimes we're going after an audience that is so specific, that is so clearly defined that we buy ads on shows with unheard of CPMs, because at a certain point, if you've got a highly desirable, difficult to reach audience, and a show that reaches those people, the CPM model just doesn't make any sense, because you're not paying for the kind of scale that comes with a big programmatic buy, or going to Meta, or going direct to YouTube, or going direct to Spotify, you're paying for access to arguably a very, very small but important group of people. We have no problem paying what others might call bonkers CPMs, because the whole idea of a cost per 1000 impression rate card doesn't make sense for certain objectives. What's the highest you pay hundreds of dollars in an equivalent CPM, and that's often sometimes it's not even framed in terms of CPM, it's framed in terms of like you said, the price is the price is the price, and that's a savvy podcaster knowing the value of their audience and saying our sponsorship packages start at x number of dollars and it's a take it or leave it, we're sold out for the next six months, so right, and so I think some smart podcasters know how to price their stuff outside of that traditional CBM model, I've seen a few of the podcasts that we work with easily start their pricing at $250 US CPM, and of course, when they're negotiating, they're not going to use that particular model, because the first thing they want to do is go and compare it to the radio station, and then they don't get the buy, but you know, the price is the price, the value is the value, and the listeners are clearly all interested in basket weaving, because that's what the show is about, and I think one of the biggest pieces of feedback we've had about all this work, which we broadly call audience verification, right? If we take as given that a download doesn't represent a person, then audience verification is just, well, how many of those downloads actually got heard by a person, or how many can we prove got hurt by a person? The biggest piece of feedback we've had on this audience verification work is, well, if my CPMs are $25 right now, who's going to be willing to pay a 75 or $100 or $150 CPM? And I think our point is brands have been paying that all along, they just don't know it, right? They're paying 150 $175 effective CPM. It's just the spillage of all those unlistened downloads or episodes that were started and never finished, that spillage or wastage is just built into the price, right? So I think we're starting to see more openness to maybe a wider range of CPMs, but also ways of buying and selling that aren't rooted directly in that kind of, you know, cost per 1000 style.

Matt Cundill  33:30  
I just find that there's no, there's a limited way to grow a show as a creator unless you have very fine data and data with consumption too, because again, the download really doesn't matter. If people are only listening to 30% of your show, that's not going to get you a lot of loyalty. That's, I mean, by episode 30, you could be done. You need to build an audience, and they need to come back. And I think having good data for creators is going to help grow your audience. And you know, to your point earlier, you just said, did it go up? That's why you look at the last three months. Did you go up over the last three months? People always look at the numbers that they see on the bumper dashboard, and the follow-up question is, is this good? And it's never satisfying to hear this answer, but our first and best recommendation is benchmarking against yourself, right? Personal best, comparing your performance this year to your performance last year, and that can be across a number of different metrics, right? You can think about reach, right, and we do think, and many people, I think, think

Dan Misener  34:30  
first about reach, how many people this year versus last year, how many people this episode versus last episode, but I think you're talking about sort of audience growth, and there are many different ways to grow an audience, and many different ways to think about what growth is. Right, so this is why in our software tool, and when we're talking about this, we tend to make the distinction between, like, audience size, as measured in people, and playback, or what broadcast folks might think of as frequency, because one way to grow your show. Show is to find new people, just find net new people who have never spent time with you to sample your show, and ideally they will like it, and they will spend time with you, and they may not even come back. So, one way to grow your show is just find new people. Another way to grow your show is get the people who are already spending time with you to spend more time with you, and this is such.. I come from the world of public radio. This is such a public radio way of thinking about growing an audience, because many of my public radio colleagues were often thinking about how are we going to get people who are listening to the morning show to listen deeper into the day. Can we get some more time spent from the same user, right, and that's where all of the work around forward pitching and promos in a well-crafted promo network makes a lot of sense, or I think about, you know, in podcasting really simple tactics that individual creators can use and big shows can use as well to get people to spend more occasions with them. If you're publishing once a week, have you reminded everybody what's still good and in the back catalog? What can we do to convince people to explore the back catalog? Spend more episodes per week with us. If we publish an episode once a week, are we far enough on our production schedule that we can pitch ahead and give people a reminder of what's coming up next week, and give people an excuse and a reminder to show up when we show up. Are we doing things like using a newsletter, using social channels to not just try and find new audience, but to try and remind our existing audiences, hey, there's something great in your podcast app for you to spend time with, and so all that unused Dai, right? What are you doing with your house inventory? Right, some of the most successful shows that we're working with right now, this is not exciting work, but it pays dividends. They're going through their back catalog, identifying and tagging episodes by theme, and putting together Spotify playlists on specific themes, and then driving people to playlists, and some of those playlists you can see them in Spotify, you can follow a playlist. Some of those playlists have very large follower accounts, right? It's another way to steer people towards the back catalog. So, yeah, you can grow by getting new people to listen. You can also grow by getting your existing audience to spend more time with you, and I wish more creators were thinking about growing, not just in the net new listener way, but also growing in the how can we deepen our relationship with our audience, how can we be more relevant such that they show up more times in our lives and we show up more times in theirs,

Matt Cundill  37:41  
so looking at my bumper dashboard, I'm connected to a whole bunch of things. You've obviously got some great friends in the podcast industry, Dan, including the people at Art 19, who this show is connected to, and as well OP Three. So we're on OP Three, we make our downloads public, and you've integrated that into the dashboard. Are you getting good support from the podcasting world. It's remarkable. I love hosting providers and services like Opie three that have open APIs and have documented APIs and are built such that we can integrate, and I think the reason I love that is because it helps creators, it helps publishers, it helps networks tell the story of the success. Right, so much of podcasting feels like

Dan Misener  38:30  
it's locked behind a login, so much of podcasting, and particularly podcast measurement, feels like it's intentionally obscured or kept secret. Right, I think a lot of this has to do with your frame of reference. Right, if you came up on YouTube and your frame of reference for podcasting is podcasts are a style of YouTube video, then it feels weird the kind of almost secrecy that some people have about their numbers, right? Because YouTube view counts are public and YouTube channel follower counts or subscriber counts are public. There's a whole lot of publicly available information about somebody else's show that you can glean by looking at how their show's doing on YouTube, even from the outside with no privileged access whatsoever. But I think in the traditionalist kind of RSS-based audio-first world, all the consumption data is kind of locked up behind a login, and Matt, correct me if I'm wrong. If you wanted to make your Apple Podcasts consumption data or your Spotify consumption data public in the way that you have made your download data public with OP three, is there even a function for you to do that? Could you make it public if you wanted to, or would you have to download a whole bunch of CSV files, and then you know, write a blog post where you were explicitly right.

Matt Cundill  39:45  
It's a screenshot,

Dan Misener  39:47  
yeah, right, a screenshot that you could share on social or something. And so I, to answer your question, I am such a big fan of, and the team at Art 19 is great, and they've got an API that's available to aggregation services like. Like bumper, which is wonderful. Op three is documented and open as well. We are big fans of and supporters of this idea of interoperability, because the more that we can share and actually have trusted verified data coming from a hosting provider, coming from a playback app, coming from a third party like OP three, this industry benefits with more transparency. Not everybody's going to like what happens when more numbers are publicly available, because what do they say about the tide going out and who's swimming naked?

Matt Cundill  40:33  
I didn't know that. I guess that's a Nova Scotia thing.

Dan Misener  40:36  
I think that's a.. I think that's a Buffett-ism.

Matt Cundill  40:39  
It's great, you know, I have often thought that, yeah, let's make downloads public, let's, you know, be on OP three, and I sometimes wonder if the CBC should have all their podcasts up on OP three, those are our tax dollars, let's see what the downloads are, and then there's the other half of me that says good shows are going to come under scrutiny by the wrong people, and X is going to be a mess, and there's going to be a lot of chirping, because people will then use the download as a way to add and subtract shows from public radio, which is not really what we want. So, again, that goes right back to what the download really is, and what it means, and how people interpret it, more than anything.

Dan Misener  41:18  
Yeah, I used to work at the CBC. I have not worked at the CBC in more than a decade, but I was at the CBC, and at the time every month the audience research team would send out reports about download counts. That's really what we got at the time. I don't know how much has changed since I worked there, and again, it's been more than a decade, but I was always on the receiving end of once a month some kind of report that showed basically raw download counts per show, and it always made me a little upset that the show that I worked on, which published one episode a week, was compared directly to a show produced by my colleagues down the hall that published three episodes, Monday through Friday, and if you just look at a list of downloads and you're comparing two shows, one of which publishes one episode a week, another of which publishes 15 episodes a week, that's not representative of the audience size, it is not representative of the impact, it is not representative of the depth of engagement. It's representative of how many files were transferred, and so that was imperfect a decade ago. It's still imperfect, and I think I share your concern about the kind of raw download count being used as a decreasingly useful proxy for audience size, because Matt, there's so much that I think people want to be true about a download, they want it to represent a person, they want it to represent playback, they want it to represent something about the value of their show, and it does, I mean, from an ad sales perspective, it absolutely does, but it doesn't really get at the kinds of comparisons that I think people might want to make when they're making slate decisions. What are we going to renew? What are we going to invest more in? What are we going to sunset, right? As they say, it's chalk and cheese. When your show came under attack at the CBC for not getting as many downloads, was that the moment you said, "Man, if I only had the time spent listening, I would show them under attack. Is maybe a bit strong. It was maybe more my own womp womp feeling like a bummer when I looked at our show's download count, compared to, and I mean, we stacked up pretty well, but yeah, no, I was, I was clamoring for better data. I wanted to know, because again, as somebody who made shows for a living and booked interviews and wrote scripts and cut tape, I wanted to know what is the impact that I'm having. Am I reaching people? Are they hitting play? Are they spending time with us and using those things, and this might sound a little selfish to make a better show, right? I wanted to know, okay, not just how many files were transferred, but how are people actually using the show that me and my colleagues make, and I wanted that data, and it simply wasn't available at the time. The great news is here we are in 2026 and we don't have a complete picture. I don't think we're ever going to have 100% coverage, but for a huge number of podcast consumers who use Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or a handful of other apps that actually deliver that data back to publishers, this is all knowable. We know people, we know playback, we know time spent, and you can take those three things and combinations thereof, and make really, really powerful insights possible, and that's before you even get into the much richer data that you can get at when you're doing things like surveys or brand lift studies for podcasts, those kinds of things, where you.

Matt Cundill  45:00  
Actually, get a representative sample of audience, and you can ask them much more detailed questions, including questions about who they are. If you could add one or two more things to the dashboard, that would really make it feel just a little more complete. Right? I don't think there's a finished product to this, like you said. This is fairly infinite, the bumper dashboard, because we can add stuff all the time, but if you wanted to add two more pieces of the puzzle right now, what would you love to add? What would be on your wish list? One very publicly, I will come out and say

Dan Misener  45:30  
YouTube doesn't provide us a people number, so YouTube gives us view count and they give us time spent, but they don't give us a unique viewer or a unique listener number, YouTube is such a big part of what this industry is seeing in terms of growth, that I really wish that YouTube's reporting and analytics APIs made that available, because we get it from Apple, we get it from Spotify, it would be wonderful, that's a huge missing piece, and that's really just a limitation of YouTube's APIs, Matt, I think the other big question is around consumption of podcasts on social platforms, and I think this has been many people, many very, very smart people have written about this, and it's something that my worldview has changed quite a lot on just over the past couple of years. I used to think I watched the movie trailer, doesn't mean I saw the movie. I watched the highlight reel doesn't mean I saw the game. I had a similar thought about sort of short form video clips, cut downs, audiograms, excerpts, all that kind of stuff that plays out on social. I used to think, oh, that's just marketing collateral for the full episode, it's great if somebody encounters a short clip on social, but that's really in service of getting people into a podcast app where they can consume the full length episode. I think my tune has changed a lot on that, and that's partly my own consumption. Part of it is the survey-based research that we see coming out from a variety of sources, and we're just seeing it in what our clients are saying, and the success that many of our clients are having in taking full-length episodes and slicing and dicing them into stuff that is pretty consumable in short form. Right, I am not somebody who is married to one particular conception or one definition of podcast consumption, and I think you know the fact that I can watch short to medium length clips of Diary of a CEO on a social video platform and never ever hit play on Diary of a CEO in a podcast app doesn't mean I didn't watch Stephen Bartlett, doesn't mean I didn't listen to Stephen Bartlett, and so I think that's something that we're watching very, very closely. The tension, of course, is the vast majority of our clients have not yet monetized the social part of their podcast world in the same way that the full-length episodes are monetized. There's just a clear model for that, right, selling sponsorships, selling programmatic inventory, selling direct sold host read endorsements, those kinds of things. I think it's a different monetization game on short form social, and so we have not built that piece out, but I think it's something we're watching very, very closely, and I think many people should be watching. I know, how do you think about this? Because I know I've certainly seen clips from this show for episodes that I've never hit play on, but I encounter them in my feeds. Like,

Matt Cundill  48:30  
how are you treating it for this show or others that you work on? Well, to your point, as marketing, and there are shows I say, oh, I watch that, The Calm Down Podcast with Aaron Andrews. Oh, for sure. I know what's going on in that all the time. I haven't downloaded that in over a year. I'm just scrolling by. They're disappearing in my scroll box. But YouTube is a great place to start, because YouTube can already identify, so long as the user attached it, the short that goes along with the video, and you know, if you watch to the end of our short, let's say we do a 45 second short, maybe I should get another 45 seconds tacked on to the episode as a whole, and there's 1500 impressions if I choose the right clip. So, yeah, there's there's some metrics, and YouTube's again, they're close, and they've got it set up, they just got to let us add it a bit, or we figure out how to, you know, count that in and amongst the other stuff, but we're going to stream this show on X. We're going to put it out on Facebook, and as well on LinkedIn. And again, I'm not going to get any credit for that, really, other than I hope somebody sees a little bit of it and listens to it in the car on the way home. I am encountering more and more people who are never going to listen to it on the car on the way home, and their perception is, oh yeah, I saw a clip of it, therefore I watched the show, or I heard the show, and I don't think that's wrong. You and I have been in this world for long enough. I don't think it's our job to tell somebody who thinks they watched a podcast that they didn't watch a. Podcast again, it goes back to the public radio. What are we going to do to make people watch this later? And it's that part at the top of the hour that you know, play a little clip, get people to stick around for next hour, and I think a lot of people feel that that's the best part of the show. I don't need to know anymore, I already know it. This is the way I used to watch Roseanne, I've never watched an episode of Roseanne, but I had a show the next day on radio, and I just needed to know just enough about what was happening in that episode to just sound smart

Dan Misener  50:30  
for the five seconds that it was going to come up on the show, right. So we've kind of done this to ourselves, and you know, for better or worse, I think there is an ever-expanding definition of the word podcast, and there's an ever-expanding audience for things that people think of or call podcasts, and in my book, as long as that means adoption of the medium continues to tick up, and there are more opportunities to serve people. Yeah, there are a lot of details to figure out around how do you fund shows? How do you monetize shows? How do you actually resource these in such a way that they're sustainable, but more access to more people and more opportunities to serve people with high-quality stuff that feels like a win. Not that it's not going to be messy as we figure out the best ways to do that, or the models to support it. Dan, thanks so much for doing this for anybody, by the way, who wants to sign up for the Bumper Dashboard. There are instructions I've put them into the show notes to make it easy for you, and this is exciting.

Matt Cundill  51:30  
I know it's been a couple years in the works that you've done this, and thanks for letting me be one of the first to try it out, and now I get to try it out at the paid level too. Thanks, thanks so much for your interest and willingness to go down this deep nerd hole with me. Thanks, Matt.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  51:48  
Another Sound Off Media Company podcast,

Transcribed by https://otter.ai