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Audacity Updated
5/09/2008
The very popular among podcasters audio recording application, Audacity has received an update. Podcasting News has a full rundown of the changes, including many bug fixes. It is nice to see some interface fixes, too, as I’ve felt Audacity has always suffered on the UI side.
Got a Podcaster Birthday Coming Up?
2/14/2008
Don’t forget that I’ve put together the finest collection of gifts for your favorite podcasting friend, family member, neighbor, or stranger! This isn’t just a list for holiday gifts, but great to find something to buy for a birthday gift or something for yourself, too. Filled with books, hardware and more, the store is broken out into … Continue reading »
Greg Cangialosi on B2B Podcasting
2/13/2008
While on business and conference-going on the west coast, my co-author of The Business Podcasting Book Greg Cangialosi was interviewed today for the City Biz List about B2B podcasting. After a short introduction Greg gets right to the point about why podcasting matters to business:
Simply put, podcasting presents yet another opportunity for an … Continue reading »
Hardware Recommendations
- Kustom KM4 Mic with Cable
- Behringer XM8500 Microphone
- Shure SM58 Mic
- MXL MXL V63MBP Computer Desktop Recording Kit
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Ryan Irelan, Editor - listen@podcastfreeamerica.com
Keeping Track of Your Podcast Statistics
Learning how to measure your podcast audience using off-the-shelf services.
A reader writes in:
How do I keep track of how many people are subscribed to and downloading my podcast?
This is the million dollar question of podcasting. While there are simple ways to fairly reliably track the traffic for your website (Google Analytics, MeasureMap, Mint), recording and analyzing statistics for podcasting (audio files downloaded) is another beast entirely.
Feedburner
One of Greg‘s recommendations in his article of promoting your podcast was to sign up for a Feedburner account. Feedburner creates RSS feeds for you and offers a nice suite of tools to manage and evaluate your traffic. Recently, they announced some new additions to their free Standard Stats service that includes tracking rich media enclosure (podcasts!) downloads.
With Feedburner you not only get to monitor how many unique subscribers you have to your podcast, but also how many are actually downloading the audio file. Now, the next logical step in this is to be able to track how many people are opening and listening to the file, but that brings up a) many privacy issues and b) a slew of technical issues. Audible.com is offering something similar to this but it is pay service. Look for more of these types of services in the future, but don’t expect them to be free.
Fruitcast
OK, so Fruitcast isn’t really a podcast stat service. Fruitcast allows you to have advertisements auto-inserted into the beginning or end of your podcasts. Since Fruitcast has to touch every podcast they deliver for you, as a side-effect you get some nice stats on how many files were downloaded for any given episode. Now, this is a simple stat tracking effort, but it may be just enough for most people. And, you can earn a little bit of cash on your podcast too.
Podtrac
Podtrac is another podcasting advertising service that offers some statistics, to help you and your potential advertisers gauge your listenership.
Sonr
Sonr is a free service that will help you track how people listen to your media files. They currently only support this tracking if listeners are using a player widget that you have embedded in your website page. So, unlike FeedBurner, Sonr isn’t tracking podcast file downloads. However, the statistics they are able to provide you are rather detailed, including pauses, rewinds and seconds listened. This is because they control the environment in which the listener interacts with your podcast. This isn’t really in keeping with the true spirit of podcasting, which is to provide people with portable media that can easily sync from their computer to a portable device. So, while this may prove useful to some, it certainly isn’t a total solution.
If anyone else has other podcast statistic services that are using, please leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.
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