With the amount of ad dollars shifting into B2B influencer marketing, you can expect grifters to start showing up.

It’s easy to verify one’s followers and engagement ratio on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, but what about podcasters?

Because podcast download numbers are not public and cannot be accessed, it’s a bit of a black box in trying to determine how many downloads a podcast has.

First, here are some things that DON'T work:

✖ Using Rephonic – this tool can exaggerate the number of downloads by 4-20x

✖ Checking the podcast’s social media accounts to see how many followers they have (many podcaster’s create accounts for their podcast, but are rarely active)

✖ Looking at a podcast’s reviews and ratings (Apple Podcast only shows reviews based on what country you created an account in. So, if you are in the States and look up my podcast Innovators Can Laugh for example, you will only see a handful of reviews that were given by people in the US. However, my guests and audience are primarily in Europe where also the majority of my reviews are)

✖ Website or blog - the amount of traffic a podcast’s website gets doesn’t correlate with the number of listeners

With the exception of seeing actual screenshots of a podcast’s downloads, there is a method I use to get a rough idea on how many downloads a podcast has.

👉 Grab it here.

Other posts around podcast marketing you might enjoy:

👉 The Ultimate Podcast Sponsorship Checklist

👉 How to Measure the Impact of a Podcast Campaign

👉 Proven podcast ad read script (with template)