How do I view the podcast listening statistics in Podverse?

[mitchdowney]

How do I view the podcast listening statistics in Podverse for podcasts, episodes, and clips?

[mitchdowney]

We don't have a way to easily get the listen tracking statistics from Podverse, but if you want to do some digging, there is a workaround to view this data.

First of all, I want to note that the vast majority of Podverse listeners do not enable tracking, so these metrics should be interpreted with that in mind. We don't invest much effort into tracking listening statistics, except to offer at least some kind of "sort by popularity" feature on the mobile app and website. Even the most popular podcasts available in our apps have very low listener statistics.

To view the unique listener statistics we have for a podcast, you can visit our API endpoint for that podcast directly. You will have to search for the word past to find the various pastYearTotalUniquePageviews fields that have the listen count numbers. Note that "unique" here means that the same listener should only be counted once in the statistics, even if that listener listens to an episode multiple times.

Podcast data:

https://api.podverse.fm/api/v1/podcast/<podverse podcast id>

For example, to get the stats we have for the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, you would visit:

https://api.podverse.fm/api/v1/podcast/peLVTHMwlg

Episode data:

https://api.podverse.fm/api/v1/episode/<podverse episode id>

For example, to get the stats we have for Podcasting 2.0 Episode 146: Ad-a-Lytics:

https://api.podverse.fm/api/v1/episode/6SW86DubB

Clip data:

https://api.podverse.fm/api/v1/mediaRef/<podverse clip id>

For example, for this clip from Podcasting 2.0:

https://api.podverse.fm/api/v1/mediaRef/9kdOn4xxK

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More info

The tracking system we use is open source software called Matomo, which we host on our servers, so the data is never shared with 3rd parties (except for the aggregated statistics, which I'll show how to access later). This software attempts to determine "unique listeners" rather than track every time something is played as a "listen." So if the same IP address presses play on an episode 10 times, in theory, Matomo will only count that as 1 listen in our aggregated data. Also, we have Matomo configured to anonymize IP addresses up to 2 decimal places, which may give us an idea of the general region a listen occurs, but will not track the specific IP address.

This is NOT a perfect system, as people could manipulate it if they want, but again, we're not in the business of tracking accurate listening statistics.