The Perfect Storm - iOS 17 and Q1
For those getting Programmatic advertising and with a large back catalog, Januarys revenue likely was a big drop vs Decembers revenue. Even for those with small back catalogues there was still going to be a drop. There is a seasonality to Programmatic ads - where Q4 is the best quarter and Q1 the worst quarter. With December being the best Month and January being the worst month. In short you have Ad buyers over buying ads to use up yearly budgets for December. And then ad buys for January are also lighter as Ad buyers take the last two weeks of the month off for the holidays and budgets are also being re-evaluated in Q1.
But this year beyond the seasonality of ad buying we also had the issue of the iOS 17 update reducing monthly downloads 30% or more for shows with large back catalogs. We went over this in depth on The Feed on multiple Eps. Below are the players queued up for you exactly where we started talking about this (a nice Libsyn feature).
One thing to point out is that the drop in downloads for shows is something seen by ALL podcast hosts and as we mention multiple times this change does NOT affect new Episode downloads. Take a listen to the clips below - and let me know what questions you still have - rob at Libsyn dot com