This is something that we've been trying to solve at Podigee for quite a while now. Truth is, it's tough. It's not easy to know exactly how many people have lis

This is something that we've been trying to solve at Podigee for quite a while now. Truth is, it's tough. It's not easy to know exactly how many people have listened (for how long) to a podcast, but you can do some heuristics based on streaming / downloading. Since the audio data is coming from servers that are under our control, we can get interesting data like the amount of bits that have been downloaded / streamed by a specific client. It's not perfectly accurate, but there is some tricks you can do just by matching the user agent + ip + the bits requested. You can for sure get a better picture than just knowing that someone has downloaded an episode. And yes, advertisers want to know everything, but at the same time, are clicks on banners an accurate way of knowing if people are really interested in your ads? Can you say that people really watch all the TV ads and do not go to the toilet instead? These are tough problems to solve, yet there are some approximations that should be good enough.