The number of subscribers are usually kept quiet by podcasters because the number is almost always much smaller than they like people to believe. This gives podcasters a false sense of how many listeners the average podcast has.

Use the poll below to tell us about how many listerners your podcast has.

It's hard to get a real handle on how to determine how many subscribers/downloads my podcast has.

What methods do people use to track subscribers to podcasts?

For my Streetwise Security Zone podcast, Feedburner usually shows me between 15 to 25 subscribers. But it doesn't show downloads by episode that I can see. People I've talked to say that Feedburner stats are not accurate.

Another podcast I do is hosted through Libsyn, which shows almost 300 downloads for each episode, but doesn't seem to say how many subscribers there are.

Stats are frustrating.

Since I have full access to all the log files on the servers my podcasts are hosted on, I written a little script that shows me exactly how many downloads, full and partial, my podcasts get. But once again, this is only "psudo-stats" because many people, myself included, subscribe to podcasts that they rarely listen to.

The only stats tha ti am using are the libsyn ones. I am getting around 1200 downloads per episode. 800+ of these in the first week.

I used podtrac for all of my feeds and embedded links. Using their prefix Podtrc will complie stats by Daily, weekly, monthly, and by source. I find it most useful since no matter where the podcast is feed from, or linked to anywhere on the Internet, it will get tracked.