Dan is co-founder of Bumper — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
This interview is from the Podnews Weekly Review
Dan Misener: Bumper is a podcast growth agency started by me and my co-founder, Jonas Boost, just two years ago this August. We exist to help podcasters, mostly enterprise podcasters, increase podcast success, and for most of the teams that we work with, increasing podcast success usually means increasing the number of people who are spending time with their shows, increasing the reach of their podcasts.
James Cridland: What have you launched this week for your second anniversary?
DM: We launched something called the Bumper Dashboard. This is something that we’ve been using internally at Bumper for close to the entire existence of the company.
There’s this frustration that we had when we started the company around measurement, proving that a show is in fact growing. There’s all kinds of really useful, strong signals of audience engagement and audience growth if you know where to look: places like Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for podcasters and now YouTube Studio, plus your hosting provider, and third party analytics services. But none of them have the whole picture, right? Apple can tell you what’s going on among Apple Podcasts listeners, and YouTube can tell you what’s going on on YouTube. But Apple’s never going to tell you through their Apple Podcasts, connect to Dashboard what’s happening over in the Spotify ecosystem. There’s this fragmentation of all of this really rich, really useful data. So, we built some internal tools to help us wrangle all of these various data sources and create a kind of bird’s eye view that would be useful not just from the marketing standpoint, but also from an editorial standpoint, because there are actionable insights that you can pull out of some of these dashboards. When you look at how long people listened and you compare that episode to episode, or if you look at where within an episode you held on to listeners attention and where you lost listeners attention, there are all of these really, really useful insights that I think go beyond the marketing or promotions of the podcast and can actually inform the editorial process who you book as a guest, what stories you tell, whose voices you sent or what formats or structures or episode durations work better or worse. Not for audiences in general, but for the audiences that you care about. We’ve just started to make it available to clients more broadly.
JC: What is is Bumper doing that I can’t get from my podcast host dashboard or a tool like OP3 or Podtrac?
DM: I think they’re telling part of the story, but they’re not telling the entire story. And I think for years the download has been the unit of measure for podcast success. And I think it comes by that quite honestly, for many, many years that was one of the few. Consistent numbers that you could pull depending on where you moved your show to from hosting provider to hosting provider to hosting provider. It’s a consistent number that you can check between your hosting provider and a service like OP3, and you can have a belt and suspenders kind of approach to understanding your downloads. But I think one of the things that our entire industry has woken up to, especially over the past year or year and a half, is that downloads may not be a great way to measure the reach of your show in people or to measure engagement or consumption of your show.
When I see a download number with my hosting provider, all I’m measuring is the delivery or really the request for delivery of an audio file. Not necessarily the consumption of an audio file. And when I think about the past year and a half, I think about how Apple Podcasts significantly changed the automatic download mechanism in their podcast app. I think about the IAB and how they’ve released an updated version of their podcast measurement guidelines, which includes a definition that is excluding more downloads than it used to. The definition of a download has changed. It starts to make me question the value of the download as a valid measure of people or time spent.
JC: So, you can get from all of the platforms a figure for total time spent listening. You can get where people were jumping in and skipping. And so with the the Bumper Dashboard, you’re pulling all of that data together so that you can actually see it in one place.
I know that we put our show, the Podnews Weekly Review, into the Bumper Dashboard and you found a fascinating correlation where you could very clearly see people skipping past the boring James and Sam stuff…
DM: I mean, boring is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe some listeners just have more favorite and less favorite parts of your show…
No, you’re absolutely right. And and what’s been really, really validating from the point of view of somebody who makes shows or is involved in the editorial or production workflows in a show is when this data seems to agree with itself, even when it comes from different sources. To my understanding, Apple’s system of telemetry, where they know what everyone has listened to for how long, where they paid attention, where they dropped off or left an episode or paused or rewound. That data is entirely separate from the other platforms. Apple’s data doesn’t talk to Spotify. It doesn’t talk to YouTube. YouTube’s doesn’t talk to Apple. They’re silos, right? And so I find it incredibly validating when I go into the Bumper Dashboard and I can see across multiple platforms the exact same episode with the exact same duration, and I see incredibly similar listener patterns. People skipped through the ads at about the same rate across multiple platforms or people skipped ahead to a particular segment that they were interested in, not just on Apple, not just on YouTube, but across multiple platforms.
It’s that kind of triangulation of the truth that I think can be really, really helpful when you’re somebody who maybe is early on in your podcast journey and you don’t really know how long should my episodes be or how many segments should I have, or where’s a good place to put the ad breaks such that I don’t lose lots of people through the ad breaks? How do I pull people through all the way to the end of an episode? And so I think my my great love of these platforms is that they make this data available to us. But I think the challenge is if you want to stay on top of this, historically you’ve needed to check one, two, three, four or five. We have clients who are checking six or seven dashboards on a regular basis just so they can touch every part of the elephant.
JC: In terms of audience YouTube seems to be massive. But that’s not the whole story, is it?
DM: I think it is undeniable that YouTube has massive reach. Significantly larger reach than any of the other podcast apps or the audio first podcast apps that are out there. Way more reach. And while there are many, many more people on YouTube or who have access to YouTube or who use YouTube on a regular basis, we have not seen that translate into the same kinds of time spent listening or what we like to call listen time or watch time as on dedicated audio first podcast apps.
So if I think about a single episode, maybe an hour long episode of a podcast, and I look at the performance of that episode on Apple Podcasts and I look at that performance on Spotify for podcasters, and then I look at YouTube studio, I might see significantly more people starting that episode on YouTube. But when we look at the amount of time spent YouTube, at least for the shows that we work on, tends to have lower average time spent listening or lower average listen time significantly lower average listen time or watch time than the audio first platforms.
I think the value in the Bumper Dashboard is bringing this data together and in the storytelling. Just one example of this is we were talking earlier about iOS 17 and the changes to automatic downloads. We’ve worked with so many teams where the downloads story as of late has been kind of a bummer. Downloads have been declining for a lot of the teams that we work with, but the really interesting part of the story is that when you look at what we would call verified listeners, the listener numbers or the viewer numbers that come from Apple, they come from Spotify, they come from YouTube. When you look at how many people have actually spent time with an episode, or hit play on an episode? Those numbers are growing. And so we’ve got these two things going on in parallel. We’ve got audience numbers as measured in people, unique people who actually hit play. Those are growing. And at the exact same time, we’ve got download numbers that are declining. And if your entire worldview is seen through a downloads centric lens, that can be a bummer. And that can lead to perhaps a misleading interpretation of your true audience size or composition.
I think the real value is maybe not in the charts and graphs. It’s in the storytelling. It’s being able to compare those two things and say, yes, downloads are declining for this technical reason. And our audience, as measured in people who we might want to sell something to or we might want to hear, we might want them to listen to our ads, or we might want to sell them a book or a concert ticket or some merch. The number of people, it’s actually growing. And so I think it’s more about sort of the the storytelling and the interpretation of the data, not a fancy dashboard with some charts in it.
Dan is speaking 11.00 to 11.30am on Tuesday in the industry track stage at Podcast Movement.