The most popular episodes of the show on Spotify

 Per usual, this post has been sitting in my “to publish” queue for quite a long time. So long, I probably need to write another post like this.

I was reviewing the blog and noticed I did an episode in 2021 showing the most popular episodes of the show. I thought I would do a similar post. What I expected though was the list would be very much the same as 2021, that some of my big hits then would still be the largest now. What I saw instead surprised me. Not only are the episodes different, but the way Spotify for Podcasters is measuring audience size is totally different. It looks like my analytics now only measures Spotify listens. 

As I might have mentioned before, this is the new goal post for all Spotify for Podcasters milestones.  All host read ads are discontinued right now, which kind of makes sense to me. Policing what thousands of podcasters say in an ad read is probably pretty tough, so it makes sense they ended that program. It looks like they are rolling out some dynamic insertion ads, but I haven’t been offered a spot in the program yet. I think they are looking for larger shows.

In order to combat this lack of revenue, I was considering starting The Frug Life Plus, a subscription to some exclusive content. I actually already have an episode ready for it. In order to activate subscriptions, I needed to turn off listener support. I said ok, turned it off, and then was told I needed 100 Spotify listeners within the last 60 days. To which I said, ok, I will turn this on later. But when I went to turn listener support back on, it said the same thing. So I guess I opted myself out until I can grow the show. 

Anyways, here are the most popular episodes on spotify.

And oh, I guess I filtered on stars, not listens.  Filtering on listens gives me a similar, but slightly different list.

 I guess one thing I do notice, these episodes were all from an era when the show was still weekly, I suppose that actually helped. 

My most recent episodes actually have horribly low listens on spotify.

This isn’t entirely surprising though, as most of my audience is on apple podcasts.  Further, I can’t actually find any metrics of the show’s success on other platforms now. On spotify alone I have 2K streams. 

Across all platforms though, the last I checked, that number was over 10k, so less than 20% of my audience uses spotify. Actually, I went back and found how to get my Spotify numbers, somehow I was logged into my account “the wrong way”  and couldn’t see it. It is actually 30K plays, so my Spotify audience is really quite small. 

Personally I don’t listen to podcasts on spotify either, at least generally. Sometimes on my Alexa I will use spotify. But personally, I use Podcast Addict.  

Here are my top episodes overall, and quite similar to the 2021 post.

The one that does stand out to my right now, is my episode on Yotta savings, which currently has suspended withdrawals. Sorry if I got you into that. I will potentially have to post some content on that later.  A little old, but here is a pretty good video on it in the meantime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUkajbg688

Some notes though, when I initially promoted Yotta, it was a very different app than it is now. It had a simple weekly lottery system and provided a good return on your cash, especially since interest rates were so low. It was a fun way to do something like gambling, but with a positive expected return. Instead the app turned into an actual casino and the system of earning drawings/ plays in the casino got increasingly complex. So much so I withdrew almost all my money from Yotta before all this went down. I only have $100 in there right now. Now, I probably should have shared more about this as I did it. Granted, the show is a little on the ropes right now. We might even scale back from monthly episodes to quarterly unless I can get something to turn around. 

I think we still have a chance to avoid that though, and part of that is the new book coming out for the show. More details on that to come, or to make sure you don’t miss any updates on it, sign up for my newsletter here. Honestly, I don’t even have time to spam you if I wanted to.  So far I think I’ve written only a handful of newsletters, so expect something at a cadence of a few a year, at most.