Bumper's Dan Misener breaks down how to measure Listen Time, a proposed method to measure listeners' attention and engagement with podcasts.
Jonas Woost, Msener's colleague at Bumper, wrote a blog introducing Listen Time last month.
- Listen Time is the aggregate of the time a podcast's audience spends with the episodes across every platform the podcast is on.
- Misener mentions that the real challenge when calculating this is the fragmentation: you'll need to get the numbers for different platforms separately and add them up for your final Listen Time.
- As an example: Listen Time in Apple Podcasts is calculated by multiplying the Duration, Unique Listeners, and Average Consumption.
- Misener also suggests that to better measure overall engagement, publishers should look at:
- Watch Time from YouTube Studio Analytics
- The "minutes played" under Google Podcasts Manager
- Listen Time numbers provided by the hosting platform.
- For independent creators: Jonas Woost wrote a guest article for me at Podcast Marketing Magic, detailing success metrics specifically for independent podcasters.
