I’ve been using Podbean’s podcast storage and feed service since late last year (2008). It is, quite honestly, the most inexpensive service I could find with the features and storage levels I wanted. In other words: They provide the best deal I have been able to find so far.
The recently changed their statistics reporting feature. I’ve been trying to convince them it is a broken user experience for me to no avail. One major change is that their statistics no longer reports near-realtime activity. It also no longer lets me display recent activity of all podcasts. Well, here’s something I’m going to point them at: It is plain broken. I posted a new podcast (with Celio Redfly’s marketing manager) on Friday night. As of Sunday morning, Podbean’s chart for that podcast shows no activity.
However, if you look at the recent activity list just below the chart itself, you can see that this podcast is, in fact, actively downloaded through its iTunes feed or from the embedded web player in blog entry for it. I’m going to point Podbean’s tech support to this blog item with screenshots in the hopes this will get them to at least fix this one aspect of this broken user experience.
FYI: My podcasts focus on mobile technology. The vast majority of these podcasts features guests from various mobile tech firms. You can find recent podcasts described at:
FYI: Here’s Podbean’s response: Our stats system is not broken. To handle the dramatically increasing hits data, we purposely set the stats to get updated every 24 hours now. The reason to make this change is because that it becomes infeasible to generate near-real-time stats data while hundred thousands hits are constantly writing to the DB. We think an accurate fast access one-day-delay stats system is better than a slow unusable real-time-stats system.