AmperWave Podcasting reports let you analyze data about the downloads and audience for your episodes. These metrics follow the processes defined in the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines dated 9/2016.
Gathering and Filtering Data
Download data is parsed from CDN logs to accurately count the number of bytes that were downloaded by a particular user. A download is not counted when:
- The episode is only preloaded (less than a set number of bytes is loaded. May be a little more or less than a minute, depending on the bitrate of the episode)
- The download occurred from a blacklisted IP, user agent, or referrer (typically a bot or suspicious user, see below for more information)
- The download was already counted from an user in the 12 hour unique window
Partially-downloaded episodes are overlaid to ensure that an episode that was entirely downloaded in two different parts is still counted correctly.
From this raw data, metrics for audience, full downloads, and partial downloads are generated. Unique audience is calculated at report time for the given time period.
Blacklisting
A blacklist is maintained of known bot and spam IP addresses, user agents, and referrers in order to prevent incorrectly counting audience and downloads. This blacklist is manually curated. Our team uses a tool to find suspicious data and those IP addresses, user agents, and referrers are manually vetted before being blacklisted. In the future the IAB may put out a known list of IP addresses, user agents, and referrers that belong to bots or other non-valid entities. At that time AmperWave Podcasting plans on adopting that list and continue to curate our own list.