It’s not an easy job to answer questions about the statistics of a podcast. Let me explain as simple as I can, cause it’s really a technical matter.
Apple’s iTunes Store doesn’t offer download statistics of a podcast, and it also does not supply storage of audio files. What iTunes Store do offer is a category of podcasts, you can treat it just as an index of podcasts all around the world. We rely on iTunes because of its popularity. iPhone users are growing, and we can gain more listeners around the globe.
So, what can we podcasters do to get information about number of subscribers and downloads? We use third-party services. for example, my podcast uses icings.com as storage provider, which is quite a tycoon in audio industry in China.
We have been doing suancai news podcast in China over 3 years. One popular episode has been downloaded for more than 39,0000 times. In that episode we talked about the mechanism of China’s national firewall.
The difficulty is, Our show has been listed on more than 10 apps in China. Not all of them offer content provider access to their databases, So we don’t get that part of the whole statistics.
My server logs show that for each month there are about 230,000 requests of my podcast’s subscription url(RSS). People listen to new episode through iTunes software, mobile phones, tablets, etc.
Judging from all information we can get, we estimate that the total number of our long-term audiences would be 250,000-300,000. And we have confidence that number be still growing now and in the future.