Podcasting Metrics - Can You Trust Them? A Conversation about Openmetrics.org

We're going to have a conversation with Matt Snodgrass, Dave Kawalec and Chris MacDonald about a new initiative called OpenMetrics.org. Matt and Dave are from Porter Novelli and host the "The Dave and Matt Show." Chris is from Libsyn and is the co-founder of the Association of Music Podcasters and the owner of Indiefeed Podcasts.

The domain name, openmetrics.org, says what it is: An organization whose purpose is to define standards in an open manner with collective input from numerous groups, mainly podcasters and advertisers.

Here's the deal - whether you're a podcaster, podcast distributor, advertiser, audience-identity advocast, or PR firm, etc., you have an interest in finding a consistent way to create metrics for this new media,  podcasting.  If we can solve this problem, there will be more trust and more opportunity for advertising dollars. I'm for that.

The problem is - everyone's metrics are different and, well, it's complicated.  Traditional web metrics are more about unique visitors or visits per day and, if you're lucky, some way of measuring downloads. Of course, the next problem is "What constitutes a download?" What about RSS feeds that are constantly hitting your website and skewing the numbers way up?  But that's just one issue. What about metrics of the kinds of people that listen to your show? What's the reach? What countries? How long do visitors really listen?

You get the idea. Even if you're new to podcasting or if you've been around a while, it's a vexing problem. This is a large set of unresolved issues that make it difficult for podcasters to present solid, consistent numbers, and difficult for advertisers to know how to trust the numbers for shows originated by different podcasters.

This has been an issue I've wrestled with for my own shows and my clients' shows, so during a conversation with Chris MacDonald of Libysn I found out about a small group of people interested in making this problem go away.  This group is growing quickly, and you can learn more about it at http://www.openmetrics.org. 

What is openmetrics.org, and how can we work together to solve these problems? Let's speak with these guys now - Matt, Dave and Chris.

Intro and Outro music is from Matt Jones's Sunset Birth album from
http://www.bluestonejones.org/