72. Experiencing a Downloads Dip? Podcasting Strategies to Understand and Navigate Download Trends Throughout the Year

Have your podcast download numbers taken a nosedive this month? You're not alone...and it's not your fault! In this episode, you'll discover why this dip is happening, how to ride out the storm, and why January might just be your show's best month yet. Plus, I'll share insights into the trends for download numbers throughout the year and provide strategies to make the most of podcasting growth windows.

This episode was produced by me, The Podcast Teacher! Contact me at Hello@ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey. Hey. And welcome back. Today, we're talking about your download numbers. Why you are likely seeing a decrease right now in December and how you can anticipate your numbers to trend in the year ahead. Plus, I'll share one reason that you might be seeing an unusual spike in download numbers this particular December of 2024. Downloads are certainly not the only way to measure your podcast, and I highly encourage you to look at them in conjunction with other information, like your consumption rate, number of followers on different podcast platforms, lead magnet opt ins, and so on. But downloads are the only universal standard of measurement in podcasting at the moment, so we need to work with what we've got.

Chances are that if you're looking at your download numbers this month, you're probably going to see a decrease or at least a flat line if your podcast had been growing steadily. And it's not rocket science to figure out why. Right? It's December. Things are chaotic with the end of the year and the holidays. Little kids may be out of school or daycare. Big kids may be home from college. You may be traveling, hosting guests, or attending more social events. You may be squeezing in things like eye exams and dental visits before the year turns over, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

December is busy for most of us, and the routines that we have in place for a good portion of the rest of the year are likely not as solid as they usually are. The same is true for your podcast listeners, and some of them may not have as much time to listen to podcasts. So if you're experiencing the December dip in download numbers, don't panic. This is 100% totally and completely normal. There's nothing wrong with you, your podcast, your strategy, or your content. It sucks to look at, believe me, I know, but it's simply part of the podcast roller coaster, and you just need to hang on and ride it out. Before I launch into the good news, please don't use this December dip as a reason not to release episodes. Go back a few episodes of this show and listen to number 69 about should you bother to release an episode on Christmas.

The advice there applies to the whole month of December. Okay. So now for the good news. January is the best month for podcast growth, and it's just around the corner from the December dip. In January, people are setting goals for the new year and making those resolutions. They're often searching their podcast players for shows that will support them on these journeys, Shows that are informational and educational in nature are likely to see the biggest boost. But folks will often set goals for the new year to get back into their hobbies or make more time for relaxation and entertainment in their lives. In addition to the goals and resolutions, lives are settling down a bit after the craziness of the holidays, routines are being reestablished, and there's no upcoming universal disruptions like extended school breaks.

So the bottom line is that you can expect to see your podcast rebound in January from a December dip. I highly encourage you to make the most of this opportunity and plan some strong episodes for January. Create your best content. Put effort into your search engine optimization strategy. Increase your marketing, and I can practically guarantee that your podcast will make up for December's loss and then some. The good news continues from there. February, March, April, and May are all great months where we typically see podcast growth across the board. By the way, this is also the prime time of year to launch a new podcast.

So if you haven't gotten yours up and running yet, or you know someone who's thinking about starting the podcast, keep an eye out for my podcasting 101 workshop that will be happening at the end of January. I'm going to open registration in just a few weeks. So through May, lives are generally fairly routine, and there's a lot of opportunity to gain new listeners. Then, summer hits for the Northern Hemisphere, and I bet you know where I'm going with this. Once again, little kids are out of school. Big kids are home from college. You may be taking vacations, traveling, spending more time at the pool than at the gym, etcetera, etcetera. Listeners' routines are different.

Even if you're located in the southern hemisphere and these changes don't apply to you, they probably apply to a lot of your listeners, unless, of course, you have a locally focused podcast. So you are probably going to see a bit of a downward trend during this time, but you may also see some strange activity. While routines are different during these months, folks are not necessarily always crazy busy during the summer in the way that they typically are around the December holidays. Sometimes listeners will binge a bunch of episodes while they're traveling, and you'll see random spikes, and then followed by random dips when a different segment of listeners, they take a break from your podcast while they're spending time with their family. While there's typically a bit of decline through June, July, and August, it is somewhat unpredictable. And it can be incredibly frustrating to look at your constantly fluctuating download numbers and try to figure out what on earth is going on. The truth is that you're probably not going to really know what's going on. So my best advice is to just buckle up and ride the podcast roller coaster.

For September, October, and sometimes even November, depending on when Thanksgiving falls, numbers overall across the board tend to trend slightly upward again, but I have found this to be hit and miss for individual shows. It's certainly not like the January spike that goes pretty much across the board. Unfortunately, some listeners will get out of the habit of listening to your show during the summer, and then they forget to come listening to your show during the summer, and then they forget to come back to it once their routines stabilize. This is a great opportunity to reengage them with juicy, you don't wanna miss this type of episodes. And that yearly cycle brings us back to December, and I've already talked about what happens here. So if your download numbers are low right now, don't panic. Simply start planning your January content to wow all the new folks who will be discovering your show. Also remember throughout the year to look at other metrics in addition to your download numbers.

If your consumption rate is going up, even though your downloads are going down a little, I'm really happy about that, and you should be too. Okay. And as promised, there's one reason why you might be seeing an unusual spike in your downloads right about now. If you're listening to this at the time of release in December 2024. And that reason is if you were using Chartable to track your podcast's data, and you had the Chartable prefix in your RSS feed. Chartable sadly shut down and closed their doors last week, and you needed to remove their prefix from your RSS feed or it would have stopped working. If you were a Chartable user, you know all about this. What you might not know, and that I did not know either until reading about it in the Pod News newsletter, yes, I'm a bit of a podcast nerd, is that anytime you add or remove a prefix in your RSS feed, it causes every Spotify listeners app to automatically redownload every episode that may have been recently played or that has been downloaded for future playback.

So if you saw a weird spike in the recent weeks, and you were a chartable user, this is likely the reason. Unfortunately, it's going to skew your data a bit. But, fortunately, this is a one time event. If this has impacted you and you track your downloads on a spreadsheet or something, I highly suggest making a note about the cause so that when this is all a distant memory a year from now, you will know why those numbers were abnormal. And if this last part all sounded like a foreign language to you, then you probably were not using Chartable, you will not see a weird spike, and you can simply move on with your day. 

Until next time, happy podcasting.