Don’t Rely On Podcast Reach Estimates

When I hosted my podcast, I got around 5 listeners per episode.

Yet, according to ListenNotes, I was in the Top 5% globally.

Wait… WHAT?

3 years ago, I started Real Talks With Jacob to have conversations with interesting people.

It was never my intention to grow it into a huge podcast.

Yet, according to ListenNotes (dot) Com – one of the most reliable podcast databases on the Internet – I’m in the top 5% globally.

(For context, Demand Gen U by metadata.io is in the top 10%, although I’m certain they get way more than 5 listeners per episode, plus all the engagement on social)

You see, in the world of booking podcasts, evaluating each podcast takes a lot of time.

We usually look into 5-8 different metrics, as we don’t want to present poor opportunities to our customers.

So as you can imagine, it’s a pretty time-intensive task and having a single metric to base our decisions on would definitely be more comfortable.

Unfortunately, this Global Rank metric is off.

Like… completely off.

Yet, many people and companies use this metric as THE source of truth and THE selling point.

Some of our competitors even promise that they’ll only get you on the Top 5% podcasts globally.

Sure, it sounds good.

But it doesn’t consider the full picture.

And, frankly, I think it’s pretty ingenuine to use a vanity metric that just “looks good” to trick your customer into believing something that they really shouldn’t.

The bottom line is this:

Currently, there’s not a single, publicly-available metric, that would allow you to reliably compare different podcasts.

To do that, you need to look into both qualitative and quantitative aspects of each show and make an informed decision that way.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.