Crossing the 100-Download Mark: What Successful Indies Do Differently

If you were to get 100 downloads in the first week of publishing a podcast episode, how would you feel about that?

Delighted? Disappointed? Indifferent?

While some podcasters might think 100 downloads isn’t a number big enough to aspire to, it might surprise you to hear it’s actually a real marker of success. In fact, landing just 27 downloads in the first week puts you in the top 50% of podcasts on Buzzsprout.

So what didn’t come as a surprise to us is that the vast majority (68%) of podcasters who took this year’s Independent Podcaster Survey (sign up to get the full report to your inbox soon!) fall into the under-100 download mark, too.

In fact, half of all respondents get less than 50.

(Note: we excluded pre-launchers from all the data in this article, for obvious reasons.)

I was interested to know more about the 32% who have crossed that 100-download mark. What are they doing differently, and is there anything we can learn from their workflows?

Here’s what I learned when I dug into the data.

4 Insights from High-Download Indiepodders

1. Have patience to play the long game

Let’s start with something that probably won’t surprise you. One thing that stood out about the 100+ DL club was that they’ve been podcasting for a while. In fact, 36% of that group have been running their podcast for more than 5 years.

Anyone who’s launched a podcast knows that success doesn’t happen overnight. Growth can be slow, but audiences tend to be much more engaged and loyal than consumers of other media.

So having patience to see it through is a lesson to take from these high-download shows. One podcaster from the 100+ club said:

“Stick with it… Don’t try to make an audience. Make great content and let your audience find you.”

Having patience to play the long game was also cited as the most essential ingredient to having success with your podcast in our last Indiepod survey back in 2022.

2. Video isn’t the be-all, end-all

When it comes to engaging your audience, you’d be forgiven for thinking having a video component is a non-negotiable these days. With so much of the discourse around podcasting dominated by video, there’s a lot of pressure to get in front of the camera.

So much pressure, in fact, that ‘adapting to video expectations’ was flagged by our survey respondents as the #3 biggest threat to podcasters in the next 3 years. The only bigger threats respondents flagged were ‘increased competition’ and ‘AI’.

But what I found super interesting when I dug into the 100+DL club data was that only 37% of them actually do video.

Not only this, but 21% said they have no intention of doing video in the future either.

And when I compared this with the segment that gets fewer than 100 downloads, there wasn’t much of a difference.

28% of that group said they publish video episodes, and this number goes up to 34% when I isolated the under-50 download group. So essentially, what the data may suggest here is that adding a video component doesn’t have the guaranteed growth impact we’re led to believe.

Interestingly, many podcasters are still tapping into the video trend without producing video podcasts – and more 100+ podcasters are doing this than sub-100s.

16% of shows with more than 100 downloads use platforms like YouTube to share their audio with static imagery, compared with just 8% of those under the 100-download mark.

3. Longer form is IN

If you ever worry that your podcast episodes are too long, the answer is almost always ‘no’. We’ve explored this topic in-depth before, and it’s great to see the results from our survey back up the theory that long-form is stronger than ever before.

When I compared the sub-100 download group with the 100+ group, there was a notable difference in average episode length.

You can see the general trend from the graphic: the podcasts in our survey that get more downloads per episode are the ones that favour longer-form content. 21% of the 100+DL club have an average episode length of over an hour.

So this idea that no one has the time, patience or concentration span to enjoy long-form audio anymore is once again proven baseless.

4. You get back what you put in

It seems like there’s a new AI tool built to speed up the podcasting process emerging almost daily. But despite this, our survey suggests you still need to put the hours into creating your content if you’re going to cross that 100-download mark.

We asked podcasters who took our survey how much time they spend on average making a single episode of their show, from planning through to publishing.

The most popular option amongst the 100+ group was more than 10 hours, with 24% choosing that option. The most popular option amongst the sub-100 group was 4-5 hours per episode, at 31%.

As you can see from the comparative graph above, while only 8% of sub-100 podcasters spend more than 10 hours on producing an episode, while a meaty 24% of the 100+ club do.

It’s worth noting that we didn’t ask respondents about the promotion stage of their podcast workflow in this question – this is purely the time spent leading up to publishing an episode.

If this data is anything to go by, putting in those extra hours to get your podcast to the next level could really pay off – AI or no AI!

We’ll be releasing a full report of the survey results soon. Sign up to Podcraft Perspectives to be the first to get it straight to your inbox.