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Verified Listeners

Verified Listeners is a Bumper-defined metric that identifies your show's total audience size on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, as measured by people who start an episode. It looks at unique device IDs (Apple Podcasts) or user accounts (Spotify) to tell you how many people are out there listening to or watching your show.

New and Returning Audience

When toggled on, "New and Returning Audience" tells you how many new listeners or viewers you're attracting and how many return to your show over time.

  • A new audience member is a Verified Listener who has never played an episode of the show in the past.
  • A returning audience member is any Verified Listener who has hit play on any episode of the show at any point in the past.

When "Normalize to 100%" is toggled on, you can see the breakdown of New and Returning Audience for day/week/month.

Why do other dashboards show a higher number of Listeners for my show?

Currently, there is no uniformly defined "listener" metric that applies across podcast consumption platforms. Unlike what you might see on other dashboards, the Bumper Dashboard does not measure people who download, but never listen to, your show. It also does not pull in data from platforms that don't report actual listening behavior.

Downloads ≠ Listens

Podcast hosting companies often display "listeners" or "unique listeners" in their dashboards. These "unique listeners" correspond to the IAB's definition of a listener:

Listener: data that represents a single user who downloads content (for immediate or delayed consumption). Listeners may be represented by a combination of IP address and User Agent as described earlier. The listeners must be specified within a stated time frame (day, week, month, etc.).

Calling these "listeners" can be misleading. These "listeners" or "unique listeners" would be better described as "unique downloaders."

A download ≠ a listen. It is possible -- and common -- for user's devices to download episodes that never get played or heard.

Actual Listening Behavior

The Bumper Dashboard includes listener data from Apple Podcasts and Spotify because these platforms report actual listening behavior. Their "listeners" correspond to unique devices (Apple) or user accounts (Spotify) that have played at least one episode of a show.

Crucially, Apple and Spotify's definitions of "listener" don't conflate delivery with consumption. The Apple Podcasts app on your phone might automatically download an episode of a show you follow. But that doesn't mean you automatically count as an Apple Podcasts listener for that episode. By definition, Verified Listeners actually listen.

You likely have real listeners on other platforms. However, for now Bumper is only importing metrics from the three biggest listening platforms.

Does Verified Listeners include people who watched a video episode?

If you publish video episodes on Spotify, viewers are included in your Verified Listeners count. However, we can't display Verified Listeners for YouTube regardless of how your content is consumed on that platform.