I’ve been checking out the numbers for How I Got My Job episodes, and I thought it might be instructive to share what I’ve uncovered so far. This discussion will get a bit technical.

Methodology

I have Google Analytics installed on the site, and I’m also tracking Feedburner statistics.  But for the purpose of this post, however, I’m going to concentrate on the statistics available throughAwstats, and the next paragraph will explain why.

In the Summer of 2008, I decided not to get a LibSyn account and instead host media files on a subdomain of my own site.  It wasn’t until April 2009 that I turned on Awstats. So I have about 5 months worth of download data that are unaccounted for. Nevertheless the data from April 2009 to the present I do have.

Because the files are served from my media subdomain, “pages viewed” essentially is the same as “mp3 files served”. I’ve filtered out only the files for the How I Got My Job series, since I name them in such a way to easily identify them, beginning with “higmj”. I don’t number the individual interviews. Neither do I name them in such a way to date them. They are meant to be evergreen.

I expect files that have recently been released to have smaller download numbers than those that have been around awhile. I also expect that the number of downloads will continue to increase over time, as people discover them.

Individual interviews

So, here is some data for individual interviews, from April 2009 to beginning of February 2010:

• Total # of individual mp3 files available: 61.  This means that, in addition to the promo file, there are currently 60 interview files.
• Total downloads of all files: 35857. Close to 36,000 accesses of the mp3 files for any purpose: clicking a play button, downloaded through the feed, or otherwise.
• Highest individual download: 2203.
• Interview with the highest individual download: Health Educator – Ann Ronan. I bet she never thought she’d have an audience of over 2200 for her story.
• Lowest individual download: 110.
• Interview with the lowest individual download: Educator – Kevin Imfeld. Released only 2 days ago.
• Average number of downloads per interview: 588.

Cumulative monthly downloads

Here are the monthly downloads per month, for all interview files, April 2009-January 2010:

• Average: 3566
• Maximum (Dec 2009): 6273
• Minimum (Sep 2009): 1846

Parting thoughts

I bet if I asked anyone I’ve interviewed whether they’d ever expect to be telling their story on average to an audience of close to 600 people, they would be surprised.

As I look at the list of the top downloaded files, I can point to some reasons why these are currently the most downloaded. From what I remember, most of these had to do with a lot of promotion in social channels (Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn). I have noticed that there were times when I hadn’t promoted as much, and the download numbers were off.

I’m encouraged by these results.  This is an interesting exercise, and I look forward to sharing more updates as time goes on.

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