I have been watching my iTunes subscribers via the statistics over at Libsyn, and I have come to one conclusion. iTunes subscribers are not growing as fast as other podcatcher applications. Sure we saw a huge iTunes take up when they launched nearly 9000 people signed up almost overnight but what I see now is the iTunes subscription numbers not growing as fast. The number of people that are subscribed via other applications is significantly greater than iTunes which was not the case for the first month or so.
Some perspective, prior to the iTunes launch this show saw and average monthly growth rate of about 15%. Currently the number of iPodder Lemon subscribers have continued to go up about 13% per month. Surprisingly even with 2 week listing in the Top 100 listings on Apple the growth rate has been about 8% since that surge.
I have a couple of theories but I need a couple of months traffic and IP logs to get my hands around it. What has been your experience and if your show is older than 6 months what kind of growth numbers are you seeing.
Summer was slow and seen a general drop in listeners. Plus I think we saw users dropping podcasts as they subscribed to new ones. I would have loved to keep 100% of my iTunes audiance, but some get tired of the same podcasts and others just get too many subbed that they drop the older ones. There are MILIONS of people using iTunes everyday around the world, only a small amount are tech fans, if you can figure out how to use the third party podcast catches, you already are a tech fan. :-)
I have only been podcasting since the beggining of July and a do a twice a week show as well. When I first started it was all out iTunes. But I have noticed in the last month iPodder lemon and iPodderX subscriptions have actual grown