New podcast running for 10 weeks now with 5 episodes. My co-host and I are both writers with minor profiles (have written for big magazines, each have about 1000 Substack followers; I have 2K Instagram followers). The audience for the podcast is a little different than my "writer audience" so it doesn't carry over directly, but we didn't start from absolute zero.
Distribution:
- Posting show on Substack with longer episode descriptions / mini-essays, building its subscriber list but also leveraging our personal ones, and on all platforms via Riverside.
- Posting high-quality graphic carousels on Instagram (sort of magaziney, with quotes from the episode, additional art and images, etc). Building the show account but relying heavily on my personal one for amplification.
- No video yet.
Here's a rough snapshot of where we are:
- Most episodes plateauing around 3,500 downloads, usually hitting close to 1000 on release day. Most of these are coming from Substack, which has the least detailed metrics and the lowest bar (plays of any duration), which may mean a lot of these are worthless.
- According to Apple and Spotify metrics, about 50-75% listen to the full episode (around an hour).
The download numbers seem at least superficially good for a new podcast, but I'm not sure what we should be considering successful. I'm inclined to think Substack subscriptions and platform follows are probably the most important for retention, and those are growing much more slowly. I'm not worried about it, just wondering how other people think about it.