Why Podcasting's Numbers Don't Add Up with Pete Birsinger (CEO & Founder of Podscribe)

For more than a year now, the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting, or AMP, has been working to create new frameworks for podcast measurement. In this week’s Media Roundtable, we’re announcing some of our latest findings.

Dan Granger (CEO & Founder, Oxford Road) and Giles Martin (EVP-Strategy, Oxford Road) welcome Pete Birsinger (CEO & Founder, Podscribe) to discuss the problem with downloads, AMP’s internal tug-of-war, and the new standard metrics that could help grow the industry.

“This type of evolution should put podcasting on a better footing to compete with other media channels for an enormous part of advertising dollars.” – Pete Birsinger (CEO & Founder, Podscribe)

Downloads and Doubt – We don’t measure downloads because we love them; we use them because they were the best metric we had when podcasting began. The problem is it’s a wobbly foundational metric, one that invariably leads to speculation and uncertainty about actual consumption. It gets all the more confusing when you factor in different metrics across multiple channels. Moving away from downloads and toward a consumption-based metric will remove doubt from pricing. As Pete puts it, “ The fewer assumptions we have to make, the more accurate the results will be.”

The Tug-of-War –  Part of the beauty of podcasting is that no one entity or company owns the space. That also means you need cross-partner alignment and adoption in order to enact change. With AMP, stakeholders like Oxford Road, Podscribe, and Spotify all had a hand on the wheel, with the shared goal of finding a favorable outcome. While getting this many collaborators to agree might take more effort, the upside is that this result is acceptable to all and gives us a real chance at industry-wide implementation. (Want to join us? Check out the AMP Accords.)

Two Simple Metrics – Out of this tug-of-war, AMP aligned on two major metrics. The first is that a play is when a user consumes at least 30 consecutive seconds of a podcast (audio or video). The second is that an ad impression is when any portion of an ad is shown to a user. If we adopt these, we take the guesswork out of ad delivery, which should be table stakes for any marketing channel. Making podcasting more buyer-friendly by removing doubt will help unlock the industry’s next billion dollars.

For more insights from AMP’s first major announcement and why it matters, check out the full episode below.