Holiday listener stats & new iPods

[Icebox]

I'm just curious, my libsyn stats saw a sharp jump in November, then returned to 'normal' in December. Did anyone else see the upswing in month #11? I'm curious because if it's just me, that could tell me something about the programming I aired that month.

On a semi-related topic, I believe iPod sales were fairly robust this holiday season. My 75 year-old father got one, and it was the most requested item on our 'Calls to Santa' program this year.

The question is this: Do you think all those new ear buddies out there will lead to a listener jump in January? February?

Looking forward to the opinions.



-Jeff

[UltraRob]

Reading this, I popped over and checked my daily stats for December this year. For some reason December 28th got 2.8 times the normal daily traffic (from 78 downloads to 225 downloads) when nothing new had been added to the feed in the last few weeks. I think this can safely be attributed to new iPods and MP3 players, but it might be my regular listeners adding the feed to new iPods as well.

Rob

[finalrune]

Novembers are usually slow-ish for me; at least, compared to Oct where I really see a huge bump in activity (featuring piles upon piles of gruesome tales seems to be working at attracting a crowd).


Dec saw traffic bump up about 1.5% from Nov, mostly of the extra traffic looks to be from special features I did such as writing about Christmas related programming. I never do enough forward-promotion, but whenever I do I see the effort repaid with more Google searches and higher downloads.

For Christmas I tried releasing a four-parter on the podcast which wasn't as successful as I thought it would be. The first part got about the regular amount of downloads, (~300) but the other three parts all got less than 100.

So I'm not sure if it's a technology issue or a listener preference that lead to the lower #s on other episodes.

We'll see about New Year's!