Joakim Johansson, from Swedish Radio, understands that the podcasting industry has an issue when it comes to listening data. “There is no box office for podcasting”, he said.
He decried the podcast industry – people said the Serial and S-Town podcasts broke all records in podcasting. But really, “what records?” asks Joakim. The market is so new and no one has figured out the best way to measure listening.
So how should podcasters track their listening downloads and streams - across all platforms in exactly the same way?
Poddindex is a new agreed measurement for Swedish podcast producers. Everyone involved (Acast, Bauer Media and Swedish Radio) agrees on validity of the data and everyone is working on driving their listening figures.
How does it work? Behind Poddinex sits a set of guidelines written by an independent group. All of the companies involved have been able to “plug in” their own system to the Poddinex machine. So the weekly reach for all of the podcasts in the system is known and, importantly, is comparable.
Everyone benefits. If podcast makers are transparent about the audience growth then the industry can work together to grow.
So where will Poddinex go next?