George is founder and developer of PodAnalyst — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
George Lejnine: PodAnalyst is a new podcast analytics platform. We’re following the ethos that Bumper and Dan Misener have established of the ‘death of the download’.
Back in the day, we had a hit counter on your eBay page, and that was considered sophisticated technology. But now that Apple and Spotify and YouTube are offering far greater telemetry, you really should just be looking at that. Downloads should be just an assist, really, for covering the Overcasts and the Podcast Addicts out there that don’t share telemetry yet.
SS: The idea is that you use PodAnalyst to get first-party data back from your Apple account and your Spotify account - and, later, the YouTube data as well. What is it that I get to see?
GL: Everyone has to have some table stakes measurements: which is Unique Listeners. That’s the big one. Then, listening hours or whatever variation of that terminology you want to call it. And of course, you get plays and followers if you still care about that.
But the big thing that we are really focusing in on is your listener retention. We have a really interesting user interface to show you all of your episodes. At a glance, you can start seeing outliers - we use a lot of color to visually represent how you’re doing. Putting this data together - that is the real value in using PodAnalyst.
SS: Would I do with the data that you’ve given me? How would I improve my podcast?
GL: So that’s the interesting thing. You need to come in and still apply some analytical thinking. We’re gonna give you all the data and present it to you in a very visually appealing way, but you need to look at the numbers. This episode performed incredibly poorly. Why? You can click into an episode and go into your retention curves and see. Why did people just straight up leave halfway through the show? We provide you the ways to see that. But you at the end of the day still have to make that interpretation.
The big thing that I want to bring to 2026 is to be able to share your podcast measurement information. And I want to really caveat this up front: you have to explicitly state that you want to share your data. But - you might want to give a partner permanent access to this whole platform, to let them see what’s going on. Or perhaps you have a three-episode sponsorship, and you just show them these three. They don’t need to see everything else. Maybe we’ll show them a few previous episodes, like this is how we normally perform, so they can set a good the return on ad spend metric for themselves.
SS: I think I agree that the download is the new metric. We still have the ultimate problem, which is I like the big number of the download, and I don’t like the small number of the unique listeners.
GL: If you want a pat on your back, then go look at your download numbers. But if let’s just say your your value of creating your podcast is to spread the message, not to generate ad advertiser interests, then you shouldn’t be looking at the download number - you should be looking at your actual consumption, because otherwise at that point you’re just lying to yourself.
Now what you can do is you can look at your content and see that hey, that pre-roll that we do, we lose 40% of our listeners every single time. People are not even getting to the content. We can see this, the data is there. Spotify and Apple and YouTube are telling us that. Let’s go one episode without a pre-roll. Maybe we do a cold open, we do 30 seconds, and then we throw in a pre-roll (I guess it’s not technically a pre-roll at that point, but not a mid-roll either) and see how that impacts it. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?
SS: George, if I want to get onto the beta and onto testing PodAnalyst, where would I go?
GL: Our website. Just click any of the buttons that say “start free forever”. Right now, everybody, it doesn’t matter the size of your podcast, how many podcasts you have, you can join and 24 hours after you sign up, your data will start appearing there.
Then, sometime in January probably, we’re gonna switch over to paid subscription for many (but our free forever plan, for under 1,000 listeners a month, won’t go away). Let’s push the industry forward. Let’s encourage everybody to adopt this metric. I would love to see people start using the share feature to show how the numbers really look. Get everybody comfortable. Hey, 10 million downloads, 1 million listeners. Same return on ad spend. But now you have that precision and you can see it.
SS: George, congratulations.
GL: Thank you so much.