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Discovery: 🎧 Listen Notes
Best podcast catalog/stats website: Listen Notes
Understanding data about the distribution and listenership of a podcast is complex, and if you are not the one producing the podcast, the data is almost impossible to get. There are multiple platforms for podcast distribution, which with their unique ways of reporting data about a podcast or an episode. Podcast creators can self-report the data about their podcast listenership but rarely do unless they have something to brag about.
Compared with the relative transparency of YouTube (views, likes, etc.), podcast popularity is opaque. However, that comparison is not entirely fair; rampant bots and fake users pollute youTube stats. As far as I know, there are not sites where you can purchase “listeners” for your podcasts, but I am sure that is coming.
Listen Notes is the one site that I have found to help understand podcast listenership, popularity, and other stats. It also allows you to search for podcasts and podcast episodes and then download those audio files to your computer. Podcasts don’t have the same network effects as other platforms or media (the usefulness of a podcast doesn’t increase the more people listen to it), so I think that we’ll see a lot of the”hobbyist” podcasts continue well beyond the covid related explosion of shows last year (see graph). If…
