About a month ago I published a new podcast for one of my shows, At the time I thought nothing of it, until I checked the stats of the podcast. Now mind you this podcast has a small but growing audience, But when one episode grows to over 300% of what it was in under a week, a small plane began to fly a red flag over head. 95% of the traffic for the podcast is from iTunes and I began searching the store to see if I got on the new and notable or on a featured list. Well I was on none… not that I could find.
After sleeping on the thought, I woke up the next day and began to find out what really made my podcast jump in listener-ship.
I desired to Post a new episode for a test. One hour of posting the show I had over 20 downloads, not the norm for this show, so what was making it jump?
I looked at the server logs and it was showing that the file was only downloaded 2 times both from friend feed…
Why? Well I went into my sever logs and there was 404 errors UP the WAZOO. (404 errors mean that the file was not found)
So why? I had checked the post and the file played, checked the feed on the server side, it played. and then feed burner… 404 error… ok thats odd!
What Feed Burner does for podcasters is makes podcasting on other blog software a little easier, If your using blogger, drupal, or typepad, it retags your RSS feed into an something that iTunes or other podcast readers can read (it also makes the RSS feed look all pretty)
Feed burner also has a feature that you can track your downloads, although it doesn’t work that well it does give you a jist of what they are. and that was the problem.. the tracker.
I scrambled to have iTunes get a new feed from my server, which takes some time.
Now heed this warning IF you use feedburner you get NO user end support. none at all… why? because it is FREE, google who owns the software cant support all the users who do use it.
If you do use it, only use feedburner for a rss redirect and dont put your faith in some thing that could make you loose your listeners.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve never used the download tracking in Feedburner. its not accurate, and I’ve got stats via libsyn, or podtrac.
hm…interesting…