Feed hits and monthly downloads are two podcast stats the may confuse or mislead podcasters. Here's why you should never rely on these meaningless numbers.

Why feed hits are a meaningless stat

Every time a podcast app check for new episodes, it's checking for updated information from your RSS feed. That counts as a feed hit each time.

Tools like FeedBurner, FeedBlitz, and some startup podcast hosting companies may offer stats on how many times your feed is loaded.

But such a stat doesn't tell you the true size of your audience, for the following six reasons.

1. There is no measurement standard

Unlike the industry standard we have for measuring podcast downloads, there is no association setting a standard or guideline for measuring feed hits.

For example, should only full downloads of the feed be counted, or should head requests (probably checking the "Last-Modified" date) be counted, too?

2. Apps refresh feeds throughout the day

Whereas a podcast episode is usually downloaded only once, a podcast RSS feed will be loaded multiple times. Some apps refresh the feed every hour. Some apps refresh even more frequently than that!

This then requires more filtering to reduce the excessive duplication by IP address.

3. There's no way to track a single device across multiple IP addresses

Speaking of IP addresses, most mobile devices will probably have at least three different IP addresses in an average day: one for home, one for work, and one for mobile. But there could be even more if your mobile device automatically connects to additional wifi networks (such as a store, a coffee shop, a friends house, etc.). And if you leave a particular region, it's likely your mobile data provider will give your device a new IP address as the location changes.

For media downloads, this kind of IP address behavior can be accounted for with some different filtering and crossreferencing. Even at the simplest level of measurement, podcast apps will download an episode only once unless the user forces it to redownload.

But since mobile devices refresh the feeds throughout the day and their IP addresses change as their location changes, a single device could show up as multiple devices based on RSS feed hits.

4. Feed traffic varies every day

Podcast RSS feeds are only checked based on app settings and user interaction. This usually results in lower activity on the weekends. Measuring RSS feed hits would make it seem like your audience unsubscribes on the weekends.

Many website statistics tools, such as Google Analytics, will track a user across multiple visits, so it's easy to see how many unique visits you had across time (such as a week or month). But FeedBurner and other RSS tools don't offer such tracking, and thus report only a daily number or an average across days (but not tied to actual users).

5. Feed stats exclude non-RSS plays

Trying to measure "subscribers" raises the question, what really is a "subscriber"? While it may seem reasonable to say anyone who has pressed "Subscribe" on your podcast is a subscriber, that excludes many loyal audience members.

Some people will faithfully visit your website and press play on your latest episodes. Some people will watch or listen on social networks. Some people will add your podcast to their app without actually subscribing to it. Some people use apps or services that subscribe to your feed only once for thousands of users (such as Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or Google Play Music).

People on those platforms could still be loyal consumers of your podcast, but they're not individually subscribed to your own RSS feed. Thus, anything that tracks you audience through RSS hits or downloads will not count any of these other loyal fans.

6. iOS 11 refreshes feeds repeatedly (possible bug)

Lastly, Apple Podcasts in iOS 11 introduced some strange new behavior regarding podcast RSS feeds. This is resulting in a significant increase is feed hits since iOS 11.

While there are different theories to explain this, we do not yet know whether this is an intentional design by Apple or a bug in the app. But we can compare these daily feed hits to daily downloads and see this increase is not an actual increase in audience.

Why downloads per month/week/day is a meaningless stat

You'll often see podcasters speak highly of their downloads per week, per month, or per day. While some numbers can be fun to celebrate (my own Noodle Mix Network reached 15 million total downloads in Fall 2017), these "downloads per time" (DPT) don't really mean much; they don't tell you any truth about the size of the audience!

Here's why.

1. It's not enough information

Downloads per time tell us nothing about the podcast's actual reach. It doesn't tell us how many episodes were published, how many episodes were already available