Blog Relations

It’s nice to note that the subscribers to our children’s story podcast, Storynory, have passed the 1000 mark.

Our feed is a real tease. It’s been flirting with 1000 for the last few days, and then ducking down again, before finally spurting over it on Monday night.

We came a long way in February. Just a month ago we had 341 subscribers. Ahead of us still looms a big mountain to climb to achieve our goal of building a children’s brand over the next couple of years or so.

So how many subscribers do you really need to get noticed?

Figures are hard to find, but one place to look is the Podfeed chart which takes numbers from Feedburner. Not all podcasts release figures via Feedburner by any means, but at least this is something to go on.

This guy has got a feed off the iTunes top 100 podcasts. (This is the US, not UK, version.) You can see that Diggnation comes in at Number 96, and we know from Podfeed that it has around 23,000 subscribers hitting its feed in the last 24 hours. Photoshop TV is at number 23 with 26,000 subscribers as of today (though I’ve seen it as high as 30,000 mid-week).

Numbers of downloads provide another benchmark. Storynory had 21,000 downloads in February according to Awstats, though we ae now running at around 1000 a day just via our feed, and so we are expecting at least 30,000 downloads in March. We will easily exceed our 250 Gig monthly allowance from Bluehost and have to buy some more bandwidth.

According to this BBC Press Release, The Best of Moyles, which is Number 2 in the iTunes UK chart, had 447,00 downloads in December. Radio 4’s Today, which is at Number 82 in the US/World Chart, had 412,000 downloads, and the intellectual In Our Time had 145,000. A more recent press release implies that In Our Time had 180,000 downloads in January, taking it to 92 in the US/World itunes chart.

The numbers are a moving target, going up all the time. But on today’s figures, you need about 180,000 downloads a month and/or 30,000 subscribers to get into the iTunes US 100.