showing you the data 🎙️
B2B Podcast Insights from Share Your Genius
Genius Cuts is back! And we’re committed to cutting through the noise to give you content strategy insights to help you get the most out of your podcast. Because at Share Your Genius, it’s never just a podcast™. (P.S. If this is not your thing, you can opt on out, no hard feelings).
—Rachel Elsts Downey, Founder & CEO, Share Your Genius
📊 Show Me The Data
If there’s one consistent question we’ve received from our clients this year, it’s this:
What are B2B industry standards for podcasting metrics?
(Shout out to Alex Gramling, Devin Reed, and Mark Huber.)
And we didn’t have any clear-cut data to point to.
Then we remembered we are a podcast production agency.
And we have insights from over 80 shows and more than 3,000 episodes.
So we crunched the numbers. Here’s what we’re rockin’ with.
Our average client’s show:
Averages 138 downloads in the first week of an episode release
Averages 15% subscriber growth (~20 subs) month-over-month
Has an average 63% consumption rate
👉 While we’re talking metrics, here’s a friendly reminder of why downloads don’t define the success of your podcast.
And our top 10% performers:
Averages 718 downloads in the first week of an episode release
Average 81% subscriber growth month-over-month
Has an average 88% consumption rate
👉 While talking about performance, we love this “Content without consumption is a massive waste.” Well said, DemandBase & The Juice.
Now, how does that compare to the industry at large? We got you, boo.
A.k.a. Keep reading.
💡 Cutting Through the Numbers
1. According to The Podcast Host, the top 25% of podcasts get 115 or more downloads in the first week after episode release. According to Backlinko, the top 25% of podcasts threshold sits at 93 downloads in the first week, and the average episode gets 141 downloads in the first 30 days. Our clients are working hard to make their niche, branded shows successful, and it shows with their average 138 per episode during release week. Ya’ll are setting the bar high!
2. The average monthly episode rate across all shows is 3 per month (the average of biweekly and weekly shows—go figure). Consistency is key for growth, so we recommend posting at least 2 episodes monthly.
What does this mean for those with a monthly show? Or seasonal content? It doesn’t necessarily mean your strategy needs to change. Just keep in mind your outcome; if the outcome is audience growth, then yes, it might be time to review your production cadence.
3. Consumption is still the gold standard for determining how well your content is being received. In other words, how long are they sticking around once someone shows up to listen? Time spent with brand is a metric we’ve been tracking since day one (and others are catching on, peep Spotify’s newest metric release).
Attention is the core tenant for success in any content metric of performance; if you’re not rocking an average of 70% consumption, let’s think about whether we’ve got the wrong target audience or if the content simply does not resonate. That’s the power of understanding consumption.
✨ Genius Musings
A collection of helpful resources, events, and other content highlighting some of our favorite partners, creators, and clients.
🟢 Spotify For Podcasters has added listen time and consumption hours to their analytics dashboards. 👏
🫶 What do we want? More human connection! Where do we want it? In marketing! Who can help? Our own Rachel Elsts Downey and a great partner, Mark Kilens! Join them for this webinar next Tuesday, June 25th.
💻 This one is for your product marketers—diving into all the BTS things you can’t find on the internet on how to run product marketing well. Send them Andrew Capland’s mini-series.
🎧 Career growth advice, marketing tips, it’s got all the goods. It’s Mark Huber on Reed Between the Lines with Devin Reed.
🔦 Content Spotlight: How Stories Happen
Capturing emotion, holding attention, teaching a lesson. These things take skill and practice.
So who do we call when to we need to pony up on our storytelling prowess? We learn from our friend Jay Acunzo and his new show, How Stories Happen.
