Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Next, I have two questions that are very similar, so I’ll just lump them together. Alan Massaro asks “Gary, congratulations on your success. Wondering if you know anything about who’s listening? Age? Sex? Country?”

Likewise, Kyle Dunham, asks, “What are the demographics of your listeners? Do they tend to be older or younger? Are they primarily in the US or in other countries? Do your analytics affect your podcast topics??”

I should note that there is only so much you can really know about a podcast audience. Some data you can be quite certain of, and other data is more speculative and you have to extrapolate.

What I know with a high degree of confidence is the data that comes from IP addresses. IP addresses are roughly assigned by geography, so you can have an idea of where people are downloading the show from.

As of the day I am recording this, my audience is 73% in the United States, 8% in Canada, 3% in the United Kingdom, 3% in Australia, and then 1% in Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Ireland, South Africa, and France.

This has changed dramatically over the last few months. In December, the audience was only about 60% American, and the growth in the show since then has been almost entirely in the US.

The top cities over the last 30 days are Chicago, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Sydney, Portland, Atlanta, Denver, and Melbourne, Victoria.

As far as demographic information, such as age, sex, or income, it is impossible to decipher that from simple internet data. However, some listening platforms have that data and share it in the aggregate. In particular, Spotify had demographic data.

Spotify only accounts for 16% of my total downloads, but it’s the only data I have. I have no clue if the demographics on Spotify are representative of every other platform.

According to Spotify, the audience is 70% male and skews older, with 31% between 45-59, 28% between 35-44, and 18% between 28-34.

I have a suspicion, but cannot prove, that the audience on Apple Podcasts would not skew as male or as old, simply given the nature of iPhone owners.