Dan Misener: 0:12

And I'm Dan Misener, co-founder of Bumper. And later, we're going to talk about the bumper dashboard, our attempt to take some of the hassle out of podcast measurement.

James Cridland: 0:22

So, Dan, first of all, let's start with who is Bumper?

Dan Misener: 0:25

Bumper is a podcast growth agency started by me and my co-founder, Jonas Boost, just two years ago this August. We exist to help podcasters, mostly enterprise podcasters, increase podcast success, and for most of the teams that we work with, increasing podcast success usually means increasing the number of people who are spending time with their shows, increasing the reach of their podcasts.

James Cridland: 0:57

Yeah. So two years into bumper. So what have you launched this week for your second anniversary?

Dan Misener: 1:04

We launched something called the Bumper Dashboard. And this is something that we've been using internally at bumper for close to the entire existence of the company. There's this frustration that we had when we started the company around measurement, proving that a show is in fact growing. And the frustration was largely fragmentation. Right. There's all kinds of really useful, strong signals of audience engagement and audience growth if you know where to look. And so for years, places like Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for podcasters and now YouTube studio, your hosting provider, third party analytics services. They're all these great places that you can go and check some facet of whether your show is growing. But none of them have the whole picture, right? Apple can tell you what's going on among Apple podcast listeners, and YouTube can tell you what's going on on YouTube. But Apple's never going to tell you through their Apple Podcasts, connect to Dashboard what's happening over in the Spotify ecosystem. So there's this fragmentation of all of this really rich, really useful data. And born of that frustration, we built some internal tools to help us wrangle all of these various data sources and create a kind of bird's eye view that would be useful not just from the marketing standpoint, but also from an editorial standpoint, because there are really, really useful, all actionable insights that you can pull out of some of these dashboards. When you look at how long people listened and you compare that episode to episode, or if you look at where within an episode you held on to listeners attention and where you lost listeners attention, there are all of these really, really useful insights that I think go beyond the marketing or promotions of the podcast and can actually inform the editorial process who you book as a guest, what stories you tell, whose voices you sent or what formats or structures or episode durations work better or worse. Not for audiences in general, but for the audiences that you care about. And so we were frustrated with this fragmentation and we built the bumper dashboard for ourselves, and we've just started to make it available to clients more broadly.

James Cridland: 3:27

So, I mean, I can get total download numbers from my podcast host from the excellent Buzz Sprout dashboard. I

Dan Misener: 3:36

Mm

James Cridland: 3:36

can

Dan Misener: 3:36

hmm.

James Cridland: 3:36

also get my details from OPI three. What what is is bumper doing that I can't get from these tools?

Dan Misener: 3:47

Both of the tools that you mentioned, your podcast hosting provider or what I would call a pass through analytics prefix like OPI three and there are many others out. I think they're telling part of the story, but they're not telling the entire story. And I think for years the download has been the unit of measure for podcast success. And I think it comes by that quite honestly, for many, many years that was one of the few. Consistent numbers that you could pull depending on where you moved your show to from hosting provider to hosting provider to hosting provider. It's a consistent number that you can check between your hosting provider and a service like O.P three, and you can have a belt and suspenders kind of approach to understanding your downloads. But I think one of the things that our entire industry has woken up to, especially over the past year or year and a half, is that downloads may not be a great way to measure the reach of your show in people or to measure engagement or consumption of your show. Because last I checked,when I see a download number with my hosting provider or I see a download number and a pass through analytic service like open three, all I'm measuring is the delivery or really the request for delivery of an audio file. Not necessarily the consumption of an audio file. And when I think about the past year and a half, I think about how Apple Podcasts signify quently changed the automatic download mechanism in their podcast app. I think about the IAB and how they've released an updated version of their podcast measurement guidelines, which includes. A definition that is excluding more downloads than it used to write. It's become sort of more exclusive or more restrictive. The definition of a download has changed, and I think about some of the reporting that Ashley Carman has done looking into various shenanigans that unscrupulous podcast marketers have gotten up to to boost or increase those download numbers without any real sense of listener intent. Right? When I hear or read stories about in-app currencies in mobile gaming gems in a mobile game being exchanged for. Play actions or download

James Cridland: 6:26

Yeah.

Dan Misener: 6:27

actions or follower actions inside a podcast app. It starts to make me question

James Cridland: 6:32

Yeah.

Dan Misener: 6:32

the value of the download as a valid measure of people or time spent.

James Cridland: 6:39

Right. And whereas, of course, you can get from all of the dashboards out there that the platforms run, you can get

Dan Misener: 6:47

Hmm. Hmm.

James Cridland: 6:47

total time spent listening. You can get where people were jumping in and all of that. And so you with the the bumper dashboard, you're pulling all of that data together so that you can actually see it in one place. Are you actually seeing that these numbers correlate? I know that we put this very show into the bumper dashboard

Dan Misener: 7:09

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

James Cridland: 7:09

and you found a fascinating correlation in a in a show of ours, you know, quite some time ago where you could very clearly see people skipping forward to, you know, to get rid of the boring James and Sam stuff. Go and go for an interview. Makes you feel.

Dan Misener: 7:27

I mean, boring is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe some listeners just have more favorite and less favorite parts of your shows. No, you're absolutely right. And and what's been really, really validating from the point of view of somebody who makes shows or is involved in the editorial or production workflows in a show is when this data seems to agree with itself, even when it comes from different sources. So. To my understanding, Apple's system of telemetry, where they know what everyone has listened to for how long, where they paid attention, where they dropped off or left an episode or paused or rewound. That data is entirely separate from the other platforms. Apple's data doesn't talk to Spotify as Spotify. It doesn't talk to YouTube. YouTube's doesn't talk to Apple. They're silos, right? And so I find it incredibly validating when I go into the bumper dashboard and I can see across multiple platforms the exact same episode with the exact same duration, and I see incredibly similar listener patterns. People skipped through the ads at about the same rate across multiple platforms or people skipped ahead to a particular segment that they were interested in, not just on Apple, not just on YouTube, but across multiple platforms. It's that kind of triangulation of the truth that I think can be really, really helpful when you're somebody who maybe is early on in your podcast journey and you don't really know how long should my episodes be or how many segments should I have, or where's a good place to put the ad breaks such that I don't lose lots of people through the ad breaks? How do I pull people through all the way to the end of an episode? And so I think my my great love of these platforms is that they make this data available to us. But I think the challenge is if you want to stay on top of this, historically you've needed to check one, two, three, four or five. We have clients who are checking six or seven dashboards on a regular basis just so they can touch every part

James Cridland: 9:41

Mm

Dan Misener: 9:41

of the elephant.

James Cridland: 9:42

hmm. And I think one of the things that I found interesting is seeing the I mean, there's a wealth of data in the YouTube studio platform. And we have so much research out there, which is survey research, which is talking to a sample of podcast listeners saying that YouTube is now massive and it's the biggest platform since since God created the world and, and all of that. And actually this that the the bumper dashboard appears to both agree and disagree with that. Certainly in terms of audience YouTube seems to be massive. But that's not the whole story, is it?

Dan Misener: 10:26

We've had clients using the bumper dashboard for the past couple of months. We've let of course, our clients have the earliest possible access and we've been looking at a variety of platforms, including YouTube. And I think you're absolutely right. There is this moment we're in where so many teams so many podcasters, big enterprise podcasters and small independents are looking to YouTube for the growth that they want to see. And I think it is undeniable that YouTube has massive reach. Significantly larger reach than any of the other podcast apps or the audio first podcast apps that are out there. Way more reach. I think just about everybody who is on the public Internet is on YouTube, right? There is just an a ubiquity to YouTube online. And while there are many, many more people on YouTube or who have access to YouTube or who use YouTube on a regular basis, we have not seen that translate into the same kinds of time spent listening or what we like to call listen time or watch time as on dedicated audio first podcast apps. So if I think about a single episode, maybe an hour long episode of a podcast, and I look at the performance of that episode on Apple Podcasts and I look at that performance on Spotify for podcasters, and then I look at YouTube studio, I might see significantly more people starting that episode on YouTube. But when we look at the amount of time spent YouTube, at least for the shows that we work on, tends to have lower average time spent listening or lower average listen time significantly lower average listen time or watch time. Then the audio first platforms, which I think raises the really important question Should our YouTube strategy involve publishing the exact same thing or nearly the same thing as we're posting on audio channels? Or should we treat YouTube as a distinct entity where the user base or the viewer base or the listener base has a different kind of need and a different kind of consumption pattern? We're just starting to dig into this in a really fulsome way. But the early signals suggest that, yes, YouTube has lots of people, but for the exact same piece of content, like a podcast episode, we get higher average time spent listening on the audio first platforms versus the same thing posted to YouTube, which in many cases is not really a video. It's a piece of audio stuffed into a video platform.

James Cridland: 13:21

Yeah. Or as some people call it, a fake video, which I always think is slightly, slightly rude. What's the business model of this? Can anybody sign up for the bumper dashboard or is it purely for clients? And it's a benefit that the clients can.

Dan Misener: 13:35

The wonderful thing about the bumper dashboard, it is totally free. No additional cost for bumper clients. So we've built this for ourselves and we continue to use it ourselves internally and it is available for free at no additional cost to anybody who is working with bumper on sort of a consulting basis. So yeah, it's a value add for our consulting business or our podcast growth consultancy. We don't have any immediate plans to make it. Pull out your credit card and sign up for an ongoing subscription. This is a tool that we use in conjunction with the podcast growth work that we do, because the real value James, I don't think is in the charts, in the graphs. If you really want those, you can go and get those from all of the source dashboards. I think the value is bringing that together and in the storytelling and I mean, just one example of this is we were talking earlier about iOS 17 and the changes to automatic downloads. We've worked with so many teams where the downloads story as of late has been kind of a bummer. As we witness the impact of those iOS 17 changes. Downloads have been declining for a lot of the teams that we work with, but the really interesting part of the story is that when you look at what we would call verified listeners, the listener numbers or the viewer numbers that come from Apple, they come from Spotify, they come from YouTube. When you look at those viewer numbers, how many people have actually spent time with an episode hit play on an episode? Those numbers are growing. And so we've got these two things going on in parallel. We've got audience numbers as measured in people, unique people who actually hit play. Those are growing. And at the exact same time, we've got download numbers that are declining. And if your entire worldview is seen through a downloads centric lens, that can be a bummer. And that can lead to perhaps a misleading interpretation of your true audience size or composition. And so I think the real value is maybe not in the charts and graphs. It's in the storytelling. It's being able to compare those two things and say, yes, downloads are declining for this technical reason. And our audience, as measured in people who we might want to sell something to or we might want to hear, we might want them to listen to our ads, or we might want to sell them a book or a concert ticket or some merch. The number of people, it's actually growing. And so I think it's more about sort of the the storytelling and the interpretation of the data, not a fancy dashboard with some charts in it.

James Cridland: 16:21

Awesome. So if people want to find out more than I guess the first thing is 11 to 1130 on Tuesday in the industry track stage podcast movement, you'll be there and you'll be not just talking about this, but you'll be talking about the whole confusing mass of podcast measurement, I guess. So that's one thing. What's another way of of for people to learn more about your new tool?

Dan Misener: 16:46

Thank you for shouting out the podcast movement session. I am running. And yes, it is absolutely not just about the money, but dashboard is about how anybody big creator, small creator, just starting or been doing this for decades could use the data that is available in all of these different places. In addition to that, we are bumper dotcom is our website and you can contact us there. You can take a peek at the bumper dashboard. We've got some screenshots up there. Always happy to talk to people about how they can try and make better sense of all of this really rich, useful information that's available but can sometimes feel cumbersome because. Well, Judy had the log to Apple Podcasts Connect and she doesn't work here anymore.

James Cridland: 17:33

Yes. Yes. Dan, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Dan Misener: 17:38

Thanks, James.