Which is More Valuable: Audience Retention OR Total Listens/Views?

💡Imagine if you started telling a story to a room full of people and within 1 minute everyone walked out?

Besides that experience sucking, you'd immediately know the story itself, (and the way you told it) probably had a lot to do with people not connecting with you.

The same goes for podcasts and the majority of content.

For a long time, I worried too much about total views & listens. But over the last 5 years, that's totally changed...💡

✅Storytelling Strategies for Success - 1/5/23

The metric I care about the most with my own podcast and YouTube page is audience retention and episode consumption. It's what I advise all my clients to prioritize as well.

Where can I find these stats?
You can find these stats in places like the Apple Podcast Analytics feature and on YouTube Analytics. The image below represents 5 months of my YouTube stats for the weekly 1 minute stories I share.

The reality is, telling clients to prioritize consumption and retention over total views/downloads is not always an easy sell.

I get it. The optics initially look better. At first sight, most think quantity is better the quality. But in most cases, quality (for the intended audience) is a prerequisite for quantity.

Why?
Because getting views and listens is just the first step and doesn't indicate engagement or trust. Any algorithm or paid marketing campaign can draw attention to your podcast ect. BUT keeping the attention of all those listeners and viewers is where the secret sauce exists.

So what retains attention? 
There are a lot of tactics and there are a lot of smart marketers who probably have better answers - but within my area of expertise - I'd say THE MOST IMPORTANT factor in my world is story quality and delivery. And that fact is, crafting and delivering stories is an art form and takes a ton of work.

If you can't craft good stories but it's packaged nicely. People can sniff that out.

If you can craft a good story but can't deliver it effectively. People can sniff that out.

Basically, consumption and retention is the ultimate sniff test. It's the difference between that group of people sitting and listening to you for an hour rather than walking out after 1 minute.