In terms of Apple vs Spotify, Spotify had 75% of the downloads in May 2020. Here’s a graph showing downloads of Czech Radio podcasts. “Our users are truly spread out across the globe.” Does that really make a difference? So the data - as far as I can tell - seems calculated correctly. You have to manually download every episode (and our tests seem to show that once an episode is download, it won’t download a changed audio URL). Wouldn’t this also mean more downloads from Spotify apps, which Voxnest couldn’t filter out? No: since Spotify’s app doesn’t auto-download. Voxnest sent me a list of their useragents and yes, Spotify/1.0 is marked as a bot: and it’s disregarded from their data. I asked Voxnest for the useragents they’re attributing to Spotify: wondering if the Spotify/1.0 useragent - which grabs the copy - was correctly marked as a robot. We’re on to something, it seems! But… it seems we’re not. Other publishers within the Voxnest Audience Network have also confirmed that their audio URLs do change when new ads are stitched into the audio. I’ve been able to confirm that some publishers within the Voxnest Audience Network are using audio URLs with “last modified” dates in them. A chat with a competing podcast host about Voxnest’s numbers confirmed this behaviour, and added “If I had to guess why Spotify numbers are so high, these ad insertions they are doing would cause bogus downloads from Spotify.” Do that enough times, and you can guess it plays havoc with your download numbers. If you change a programmatic ad in 200 archive episodes, Spotify downloads all 200 episodes again: and it does this irrespective of whether the podcast host has 'passthrough’. Change the audio URL - perhaps to insert a different programmatic ad - and Spotify will download the audio again. Whenever you publish a new episode, Spotify downloads a copy. Some podcast hosts we’ve spoken to think the difference is something else. The difference in the numbers, they suggest, is because “our users are truly spread out across the globe” (by which they’re suggesting that Libsyn has more of a US focus). Voxnest point out that the data is from the Voxnest Audience Network, which includes Voxnest and Spreaker as well as a number of third-party podcast publishers. Libsyn’s March figures - the last I’ve typed out - shows Spotify on 9.1% of all downloads but if you just look at Apple vs Spotify, Spotify’s on a rather larger 12.3%. (The bulk of our plays are via news briefings on smart speakers). But if you just look at Apple vs Spotify, Spotify has 6.7%. For the Podnews podcast for June 2020, in total, Spotify got 1.8% of downloads. Our figures show the difference that makes. (Fill this in now you won’t lose your place!)
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