What are these stats worth exactly?

With regards to the terminology used, ‘listens’ are the same as ‘downloads’.

If someone “listens” could that mean they simply tuned in for 30 seconds, decided it wasn’t for them, and never listened again?

Yes – that would still be counted as a ‘listen’ and Blubrry would also still count that as a ‘download’ (as those terms are interchangeable).

This plugin also tracks the number of listeners that each of your episodes get – that is the number of unique individuals who are listening as determined by their IP address. Unfortunately, IP addresses are easy to fake and many people mask their real IP address for security reasons, so the listener count is not necessarily accurate. This will be the case with any podcast stats for any plugin and is not just an issue within this plugin.

It is also near impossible to determine the number of actual feed subscribers that you have. Podcasting is, by design, an open medium with no restrictions and no central authority – what this means is that there’s no way to really track this kind of thing on a global scale. You could, for example, get your iTunes subscriber stats directly from iTunes and maybe your Stitcher subscriber stats directly from Stitcher, but it’s basically impossible to get a 100% accurate global subscriber count for any RSS feed (of which your podcast feed is one).

So basically – this plugin offers all the truly accurate stats you can get – anything else is not really all that possible to actually gather.

I hope that helps clarify things for you!

If this has helped you then it would be great if you could support continued development of the plugin by leaving a review ??

Cheers,
Hugh