Darknet Diaries stats and analytics for 2022

Jan 1, 2022 - Dec 31, 2022

Total downloads (measured by Megaphone and verified by Podtrac)

27,677,785

Up 4.7 mil from 2021

Downloads per day

Each spike you see is because and episode was released on that day. The blue is this year the purple is last year’s daily download stats.

Growth for this year was pretty good! Last year’s total downloads were 22,904,867, which means this years numbers rose by 20%.

The average episode published in 2022 got about 600,000 downloads. I can guess that means we have around 400,000 loyal subscribers. Some of them may listen to episodes multiple times. And then a swath of people floating in, trying a few then leaving.

For the most part the marketing and growth has been on cruise control for me. I haven’t made any significant moves to grow the podcast. My feeling with it is the genie is out of the bottle and I can’t put it away if I tried. And I’ll just let it find its way through the world on its own now. It’s a free bird and it’s fun watching where it flies off to.

No idea why February was so high. The main thing I remember about February is I had ear surgery. I was mostly deaf in my left ear, but I got a prosthetic bone put in my ear and now I can hear in stereo! So I was really out of it all month and recovering in bed from surgery. I imagine the show got featured somewhere like Apple podcasts.

Notable 2022 Events

I didn’t keep as good of track of what happened in 2022 as I normally do. The main things are:

• 4 episode swaps with different podcasts
• Written up on different sites like Wired and GamesRadar.
• Appeared as a guest of probably a dozen other shows. The biggest probably being David Bombal.

User Agent/App

Country

Top Episode of All Time

End of year podcast app stats

Podcast Addict:

Castbox:

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

Spotify Wrapped 2022:

My stats.

Insane that 19% of the listeners, listened to over 100 episodes. pic.twitter.com/UBORdk6XXB

— Jack Rhysider (@JackRhysider) November 30, 2022

Patreon:

Apple Podcasts Paid Subscriptions:

As of Dec 31 2022, there are 1,796 paid Apple Podcast listeners. They pay about $5 a month so that’s about $8,980 a month. Apple takes 30% of that.

Website Analytics

I do not collect website visitor data at darknetdiaries.com.

YouTube

New this year is YouTube. Previously I was not posting much to YouTube but this year I started posting the whole back catalog there. We’ve added some animations to make it somewhat interesting to watch. As well as some extra content. Short hacking stories and top 10 lists. This is going very well and we have every intention to keep at this.

We started the year with 26,000 YouTube subscribers and ended with 116,000 subs. The goal was to get to 100k subs and we reached that. Not sure what the next goal is yet other than to keep making videos.

Social Media end of year stats

Twitter (Jack): 117.7k followers
Twitter (Darknet Diaries): 111.3k followers
Instagram: 33.4k followers
Facebook (Darknet Diaries): 25k followers
Linked In (Jack): 6,467 connections
Subreddit members: 25k
Discord members: 15.6k
YouTube subs: 116k

Previous stats from 2018.

Previous stats from 2019.

Previous stats from 2020.

Previous stats from 2021.

Plans/goals for 2023:

• Taking a break for Jan, Feb, and Mar. Then plan to return to making episodes for Darknet Diaries releasing episodes monthly.
• With the show running at breakneck speed I don’t have time to train up people or follow my heart and do other things, such as write a book. Hopefully by removing due dates for the show it opens me up to explore lots of other fun content.
• YouTube has me excited to play around there. I want to experiment with other types of content, such as philosophical or comedy. I plan to make some really fun videos there that please my heart.
• While I’ve always had a book idea floating around, it became clear what exactly the book will be about. And I hope to someday show it to you. Maybe 2023 will be the year for that.
• I make everything in a spare bedroom where I live. I really feel like I’ve outgrown it and would love to find a creative studio to work out of. Hopefully that becomes a thing this year.

Here’s to an exciting 2023, the best is still yet to come.