Understanding Play Counts

The method for counting podcast plays on LISTEN is as follows:

For Podcasts Hosted on Other Services but Registered on LISTEN

We display the number of unique listeners who played the podcast on LISTEN.

Plays from other services are not included.
Multiple plays by the same person on LISTEN are not counted.

For users who are not registered on LISTEN, plays are counted based on a session ID.

If the session ID is reset (e.g., by switching browsers or after a certain period of time), the next playback will be counted as a new play.

★ If an Episode Is Hosted on LISTEN (Even If the Podcast Itself Is Hosted Elsewhere)

For episodes hosted on LISTEN, we count the number of times the audio file itself is accessed.

For Podcasts Hosted on LISTEN

We count the number of times the audio file stored on LISTEN is accessed.

Plays are counted regardless of whether the access comes from LISTEN or from another service.

★ Criteria for Considering Plays as the “Same Play”

We consider consecutive accesses to be the same play if they meet the following conditions:

Same IP address
Same user agent
Within less than 6 hours

This method improves the accuracy of distinguishing between individual user plays.

★ About Audio File Preloading

On LISTEN, users often open episode pages for various reasons (e.g., using trackbacks or commenting features).

To ensure more accurate play counts and reduce server/network load, we do not preload audio files.

★ Excluding Bot Plays

Accesses clearly identified as bots (clients performing automated requests) are excluded from play counts. Specifically, we treat accesses as bots if the user agent string contains:

['bot', 'Bot', 'AHC/', 'GuzzleHttp/', 'curl/']

We continue to update our filtering to exclude new bot traffic as needed, in order to provide more accurate play counts.

For more details on play count methodology, see our three-part series on LISTEN NEWS:

How to Check Play Counts

Podcast play counts on LISTEN can be viewed from the dashboard.

How to view analytics is explained here.

Documentation