Tracking who is viewing your podcast and how often is nototriously difficult. Thankfully you are not the only one who wants to be able to track podcast usage. Advertisers are quite keen to do this, and so several sites have popped up that attempt to provide this service to the market.

Podtrac.com is a site that allows you to register an account, and then gives you a specific url that you prepend to the URL of all of your podcast episodes (i.e. http://myserver.com/myfile.mp3 becomes http://podtrac.com/myaccount?http://myserver.com/myfile.mp3) in this way all trafic to your podcast episodes get routed through their servers, allowing them to keep statistcs for you. Podcast maker will alter the URLs for you automatically if you select a checkbox in the "Podcast advanced options" in the view menu.

The challende of using podcast statistics is in knowing how to interpret them. Since a podcast automatically delivers content to subscribers, techniques that count the number of downloads of an episode don't tell you how many times it is actually being viewed. It's sort of like discussing the statistics of a TV channel by only describing how many homes have acces to it - for instance lots of homes can receive c-span, but almost nobody watches. Get the point? Unless future versions of iPods and iTunes are made to monitor users listening habbits (do you think that would be popular with consumers?) it won't be possible to get accurate viewing statistics in a passive manner.

An alternative means to get real viewing statistics is to include a URL link in your enhanced audio of in your video podcast and asking your listeners to click the link at that point in the podcast. You can have this URL point to a page with a hit counter on it. The hit count will indicate how many times your podcast episode was viewed (and in which the user took the time to click throught).