The Numbers Are In!

When I started this podcast a little over two years ago I was hoping to be able to fill a need for parents or relatives or friends of special needs children and adults. I had no idea how many people would be interested, but I thought there would be ‘some’.

Until now I really had no idea how many people have seen the Special Parents Confidential website, or how many people were listening to the podcast episodes. We don’t have a large number of subscribers on iTunes… this is primarily owing to the fact that the file size for each episode is very large. My crazy insistence on having the sound quality as good as any FM radio station is the cause. Due to these large file sizes, it’s my belief that most of the audience is listening directly on the website rather than downloading the episodes.

Well now I have a better idea of just how many people have been checking out this ‘humble little podcast’. My webmaster guru recently ran a site stat report for me, and I wanted to share some of it here. The report contains large numbers of stats including activity, access, visitors, referrers, browsers, and errors (bots trying to gain access to stuff they’re not supposed to have – don’t worry they didn’t get anything). The numbers are in, and very detailed, so I’ll just post the two most important stats: Since we started in in January of 2013 until April 23 of 2015 (the date the report was generated), Special Parents Confidential has been visited 815,493 times; with 600,882 real people hits and 214,611 spider (bot) hits. More impressively, the total bandwidth usage has been 49.45 GBs. In radio terms, that’s (TSL) Time Spent Listening. This number represents both episode downloads and direct listening time.

Pronouncing the words, “I’m shocked” is a major understatement. I think the phrase, ‘my brain did backflips’ is more appropriate. These are far bigger numbers than I ever expected, or thought possible, given that I haven’t really gone out of my way to promote the site.
To everyone who has visited, listens, and continues to do both, thank you so very much! It’s gratifying to know there are so many more of you than I thought. You have my assurances that I’ll continue to produce episodes that cover subjects you want to know about. You should also know that you have a voice in this process too. Please like our Facebook page or Follow us on Twitter so you can comment directly on each episode (we monitor those the most frequently)*. Also feel free to share episodes and the website on your favorite social media sites.
Thanks!

John

PS- if you’re interested in sponsoring or advertising on our podcast or this website, please use our Contact Page, and I’ll send you a more detailed version of the stat report and we can talk things over.

*We use Facebook and Twitter for podcast comments, rather than a webpage ‘comments section’ in order to reduce spammer advertising.