I’m in my fourth year of writing this blog and never once have I called myself or identified as a content creator. As many of you know, I write to think. I do so out of joy and intellectual stimulation. In many ways, I write for myself. Or better put, as a form of self-expression. Other than posting in the morning, as is thematically helpful for my blog, I don’t really have much cadence to posting. Nor have I looked too deeply on analytics. Nor have I really optimized for SEO. In other words, finding the top searched topics in my industry and writing a blogpost for each of those highly trafficked keywords. I haven’t done that, nor do I want to. I haven’t chased people down to subscribe. In fact, there are times I try to convince people to not subscribe (due to the scattered nature of my content).
To that end, I had not been a content creator.
But with the launch of Superclusters, for the first time, and still a work-in-progress, I am designing the content for someone other than my immediate self. Although, do I take opportunities to scratch my own itches? Yes… yes I do.
But in doing so, I am starting to think about creating content for others. And to do that, I need to look at what people like and tune in to.
Now at the end of Season 1, some quick learnings…
Note: The below gets a bit nerdy on numbers. Mostly as an accountability metric to myself to be paying attention to the below. This may not be for everyone, but in case you’re curious, and/or working on creating your own content, hopefully the below might be helpful.
- Between all the platforms, YouTube seems to be the most popular channel. Followed by Apple Podcasts then Spotify. Where Apple Podcasts only has half or so the number of plays than YouTube does. And Spotify has three-quarters the listens compared to Apple.
- May be helpful to note that YouTube and Apple Podcast count plays as just someone viewing the video for a split second (“greater than 0 seconds”), whereas Spotify counts a play as someone who’s played the episode for at least 60 seconds.
- YouTube seems to be better for discovery than the other podcasting platforms, with over 4.5X the impressions compared to the next best, Spotify. 28K versus 6K. Tracked by last 30 days, not all time.
- For short-form vertical content, TikTok continues to perform better than both YouTube and Instagram, especially for new audiences. Still perplexes me since I imagine the demographic on YouTube has more of my intended audience. Nevertheless, even on YouTube shorts, the shorts are consumed by a younger audience than the long-form videos on average.
- Instagram, in general, performs poorly in terms of discovery among new audiences. But that might simply be, I haven’t learned the IG algorithms well enough yet. Moreover the new algorithm seems to prioritize completion percentage. And given that it’s hard to shorten even my short-form content to less five seconds or less, unless I just make people read while playing some kind of looped video in the background, Superclusters will likely continue to perform poorly on IG.
- On YouTube, 90%+ of Shorts viewership comes from non-subscribers than subscribers. where 75-80% come from non-subscribers, the average for the full podcast episodes.
- On YouTube, 41% of my audience comes from the US. TO break it down further, 50% comes from the US for long-form. 27% for short-form. Spotify, 67% comes from the US. Apple Podcasts, 87%.
- Interestingly, by city, according to Apple Podcasts, New York City takes the cake on where my audience reside.
- Across all platforms, most of my listeners/viewers are in the 35-44 age range. Accounting for almost 50% across all platforms. Followed by the 28-34 age group, then 45-59 age group. In general, Superclusters has a larger younger audience fan base on YouTube, compared to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The latter two with similar distributions.
- Superclusters audience is also about 75% male, 25% female.
- While less than 0.05%, fun fact, the only other subtitles used on YouTube to tune into my podcast was French (outside of English).
Popularity versus watch time
The most popular episode on YouTube is Chris Douvos’, followed by Ben Choi’s. Episode 1 and Episode 6 respectively. My suspicion was that while both were super fun to record, Chris’ episode came first but may by the end of Season 2 be surpassed in viewership by Ben’s.
On Apple Podcasts, it’s Samir Kaji’s. And on Spotify, it’s the post season episode with Jeff Rinvelt and Martin Tobias.
But what’s most fascinating to me is that among the nine episodes released for Season 1, on YouTube, the top four most popular episodes have shorter average watch times than the most bottom five. On average a two- to three-minute difference, where the least watched episodes happen to have 7-8 minutes of average watch time.
In closing
All in all, there’s a lot of work to do ahead. And as I’m recording Season 2 and my team is hard at work in editing those episodes, all of the above insights are helpful to keep my finger on the pulse. Do let me know if I’m missing any areas I should be paying attention to or measuring.
Otherwise, for Superclusters, I’ll see y’all again in early March for the launch of Season 2.
Keep staying awesome!
Cover photo by israel palacio on Unsplash
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