How Does IAB Compliance Affect Your Podcast?
by Kathy Barron
October 2021
When you look at your podcast hosting website to find out how many downloads you have for one episode, day, month, or year, the IAB is behind these statistics.
Who is the IAB?
Founded in 1996, The Interactive Advertising Bureau is the body responsible for setting the measurement standards for the podcasting industry. Its purpose is to empower the media and marking industries to thrive in the digital economy. As a trade association, the IAB advocates for its more than 650 members and promotes the value of the interactive advertising industry to legislators and policymakers. Their members include media companies, brands, and the technology firms responsible for selling, delivering, and optimizing digital ad marketing campaigns.
Measurement powers the digital advertising ecosystem. IAB provides guidance on how to measure media and audiences across platforms and suggests best practices for measurement. Companies prefer one standard of measurement so they can know if their investment in a particular medium is paying off.
How does this affect your podcast?
This standardization of downloads and statistics means more transparency for podcasters and consistency across all hosting providers and will provide accurate metrics for potential sponsors.
The “science” behind how downloads are calculated happens two ways:
A person downloads the episode to listen to it later
A person listens to the episode while it downloads (streaming)
To be classed as an IAB complaint download, the following criteria must be met:
If downloaded, the episode must be played for a total of one minute.
Even if a person listens to an episode multiple times, it is classed as only one download.
If a person listens to the same episode 24 hours later, it’s counted as a new download.
If a person listens to the first 30 minutes of an episode, pauses the audio, and then finishes listening to the episode a few hours later, it would still only be classed as one download.
The RSS feed of an episode is constantly being requested an exorbitant amount of times in a single day. Every time someone clicks play, then stop, then play, and then stop; bots and web crawlers can affect your numbers. Luckily, there are filters to weed out those unwanted requests. What this means for your overall downloads is that the numbers have gone down because the way they were being reported has changed, but your audience numbers are the same as before.
If you are looking to monetize your podcast, keep in mind that it’s not just about downloads but about pricing your overall influence. This includes your audience engagement, social media presence, and if your show’s target audience aligns with potential sponsors. For existing sponsors, the pricing should not be changed now that statistics are IAB complaint. Your audience and influence are exactly the same.
Even though we love looking at our download numbers to measure our success, the most important successes of having a podcast is that we are inspiring, educating, entertaining, and connecting with people everywhere. There aren’t enough downloads in the world that can create such a rewarding feeling.
Kathy Barron is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Women Who Podcast magazine. She is the producer/host of Women Who Sarcast podcast. When she isn't sarcasting, she cuts digital film, rides her e-bike around town, and loves being on the water with her SUP board. @womenwhosarcast