June 29th 2010 will mark the 5 Year anniversary of iTunes v4.9 and as a Podcaster you may know that was when podcasting support was added to iTunes. That is also when the iTunes Podcasting page was launched. What you may not know is that over the past 5 years the iTunes podcast pages have only been available in 23 countries and those 23 countries represent less than 15 percent of the worlds population.
Now almost 5 years since the launch of iTunes v4.9, Apple has just added iTunes Podcast pages for 67 more countries. Including all 4 of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
These 67 countries represent over 4.3 Billion people – that is 64.2% of the worlds population – and when added to the pervious 23 countries a total of 78.9% (5.4 Billion) of the worlds population now is covered by iTunes Podcast Pages. (Population %’s according to stats from CIA Factbook).
At Libsyn / Wizzard Media we think podcasters should be very excited about this increase in coverage. As the worlds largest host of podcasts we are in a unique position to look at stats.
When we looked at May’s download numbers we saw that 90.6% of all of our networks downloads came from the 23 countries that had an iTunes Podcast page, while only 8.3% of downloads came from the 67 new countries that had not yet had the iTunes pages just turned on.
And the Rest of the World (ROW) had just 1.1% of the downloads.
Even though the new 67 countries have over 4 times the population as the original 23 countries, the new 67 had less then 1/10th of the downloads prior to getting an iTunes Podcasting page.
This shows the importance of having an iTunes podcasting page in a country for getting downloads from that country. With 67 new Podcast Pages in iTunes stores around the world this is a great opportunity for you – as a podcaster – to increase your audience.
Getting featured in iTunes is a key way to do this. As a podcaster it is important to know you will never get featured in iTunes if you have ugly artwork or worse yet no artwork at all. It is highly recommend by Apple to have at least a 600 x 600 1400 x 1400 Pixel image referenced in your RSS feed.
This image can be larger but should remain a square. If you are not someone that can create good looking artwork – then put out a call to your audience and see if one of them is willing to create artwork for your show. This is also a good time to look at your show in iTunes and make sure you have an accurate description for your show and it is in the right category.
We at Libsyn/Wizzard Media are very excited about the new opportunities that have just been opened up with the addition of over 4 Billion new people being covered by iTunes Podcast pages. We will post again shortly showing an update on how the new countries are doing for downloads pre and post the launch of iTunes pages in those countries.
