In the last week, Spotify has adopted the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting’s (AMP) definition of a play. Previously, how a play was calculated by Spotify was unclear, but as of the 11th of June, it is now defined as 30 seconds of content played once per user per session. While not officially documented, YouTube — not connected with AMP — apparently also reports a ‘view’ as 30 seconds of content played (Podnews, 2026).
Edited 2026-06-19: A Podnews update on the 18th of June has indicated that YouTube is also an undisclosed member of AMP, and AMP has since clarified the definition of a play, dropping the ‘once per user per session’ language. It now reads simply as ‘30 seconds of content played, audio or video’. While the session clause was dropped, the 30-second threshold still does meaningful filtering work for most real listening patterns.
This is trending towards a show of consistency, but for reference, the IAB Tech Lab Podcast Measurement Guidelines — industry standards for analytics measurement which many podcast hosting platforms will be certified as compliant for — specifies 60 seconds of content downloaded as a valid download, which isn’t necessarily played, Apple Podcasts counts a play as “The total number of times people pressed play on your episode”.
The fact is, even with steps being taken to make metrics matter in reliable and consistent ways, in reality, what ‘counts’ still depends on which platform you’re using. And when you’re using these numbers to determine growth, and when advertisers or sponsors are using them to decide if you’re worth their time, the lack of consistency still makes trying to assess the perceived value versus the concrete value of your numbers a challenge.
Where listens go
When you share a clip or reel on social media, that watch happens in the platform’s app and counts toward that platform’s engagement metrics. It doesn’t feed back into your hosting platform, but stays fragmented with a 10% conversion rate from watcher to podcast listener, if you’re lucky.
If you’re hosted on YouTube Podcasts and you share a short — or a clip created by their new Clip feature — to another platform, firstly, you risk algorithmic suppression because you’re sharing an external link. It’s why the LinkedIn and other platform practice is now “Link in comments”. Secondly, these short form videos are an independent piece of content, and their stats are their own, separate from the original video the content was drawn from. Even just hosting on YouTube Podcasts, if you’re hosting your audio elsewhere already, is a separate stream of media.
From the moment we release a new episode, both content and measurement data are fragmented across multiple promotional platforms, distribution streams, and even by the definition of what a listen is. We begin at a disadvantage to be able to meaningfully get understanding of what is or isn’t working. This is less true for those in the top 100 podcasts because those numbers scale and the volume carries the weight of the value. But for independent or niche creators, the fragmentation at a small visibility scale means what’s statistically significant for us, isn’t terribly significant.
The support infrastructure
The platforms and the infrastructure they provide, that we depend on for distribution, is what is meant to provide support. Those come and go, as I mentioned in Built on borrowed ground, and even the ones that remain may change their priorities, not necessarily for the worse, but it means consistency is outside of your control.
In 2024, Spotify withdrew from IAB certification, taking with it Megaphone, Chartable, and Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor). They were compliant at the time they left, and only months later announced Megaphone was working on recertification, but what does that mean for those who rely on certification as a means to gauge ROI or garner support?
It turns out compliance and certification aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them isn’t just about rigour. Spotify confirmed at the time it was still IAB-compliant even after letting certification lapse, and while Megaphone has since gone through recertification under the IAB’s current v2.2 guidelines, Spotify itself hasn’t rejoined. For whatever reason, a company with the resources chose to partially walk away from the credential. OP3, an open-source podcast analytics tool, sits at a different point of that gap: it follows IAB’s methodology closely, but isn’t certified either. In this case it’s because certification costs money1 that an open-source project would rather not spend on a credential that doesn’t change how the tool works (Castopod, 2024).
Besides platform certification, analytics tracking prefixes are supported by most platforms that allow you to add third-party analytics tracking to your podcast, but the inconsistency of how things are measured and what is surfaced attracts Pokémon trainer levels of measurement maximalism where people will stack multiple providers in a hope to capture everything they need, while further spreading their analytics in ways they now have to figure out how to aggregate usefully.
And if one goes down, like Chartable in my case, we have to find a new way to close the gap on the metric that’s been lost.
The same question of what actually counts applies to how we’re expected to find listeners in the first place. In this context, the promotional infrastructure we lean on to get discovered runs on the same borrowed ground, with its own opaque rules about what gets rewarded.
Reviewing our assumptions
We have the data, how do we map what people have heard with what actually resonates?
Resonance comes, not just from clipping the right parts of your content, but from leveraging conditions where you are introducing people to your content, not inflicting them with it.
Someone who is speed-scrolling through minute-long videos with a punchline is unlikely to be in the right frame of mind to be receptive to a clip from long-form content about wicked problems or the psychology of pedagogy. They might be interested somewhere else, but not here. For that matter, the algorithm isn’t going to match based on this user’s current behaviour. You’re not the right fit, and the algorithm can read the room.
But even if you have read the room, and are the right fit, there’s the matter of volume.
Right now, the common advice is about posting consistently. But when posting recommendations are to post multiple times a day to multiple times a week depending on platform (Sprout Social, Buffer, 2026), and assert that consistency leads to 5x more engagement, the actual data tells a more detailed story. Metricool’s 2026 Instagram study, drawn from over 24 million posts, found that the relationship between frequency and engagement depends on account size. Small accounts are rewarded for posting more often, with interactions peaking between 7 and 14 times a week. But for accounts over 100,000 followers, the reverse is true. Unexpectedly, huge accounts (1M+ followers) posting less than once a week averaged nearly six times more interactions per post than one posting daily.
This difference between effort and return based on account size suggests that small or independent creators have to work harder to get results, but more content also doesn’t mean more engagement. It probably means that the same audience’s attention is split across more posts. That audience, however large, is still finite, so consistency isn’t really about frequency, it’s about whether there’s still room left in your audience’s attention to receive what you’re posting, or if you’re just dividing the attention more thinly each time.
Fit and volume remain two sides of the same problem, and it still comes down to the difference between syntactic importance and audience resonance.
The shape of it
Your audience has layers — they exist in multiple contexts that are complementary, not contradictory. So the call here isn’t to abandon social media platforms, it’s to match the platform to the part of your audience that is present and receptive for the moment. But to get clarity on the match, you might need to take some time imagining that David Attenborough is narrating your life as you navigate the natural habitat of your audience, and observe before you engage.
As much as we’d like it to be, especially if you’re working solo, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. And I know I need to practice what I’m preaching with this myself because batching reels to reuse on all platforms is a lower effort (but not low effort) promotional activity than creating different content targeted to match different audience habitats. But it’s a waste of time and resources unless we shift the way we think about who are audience is, and how we can reach them when and how they want to be reached.
Stay curious,
— Michele
Cover image by GVZ 42 on Unsplash
$12,500 new / $6,250 renewal for members, and $17,500 new / $8,750 renewal for non-members (IAB Tech Lab, 2026)