How Audience Score Works
Audience Score is PitchCentric's composite measure of a podcast's platform reach and growth trajectory. It aggregates signals from Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and review velocity into a single 0-100 number.
What is Audience Score?
Audience Score measures how large and growing a podcast's audience is across all major platforms. Unlike raw download numbers (which podcasts rarely share publicly), Audience Score synthesizes the platform signals that are publicly available: Spotify followers, YouTube subscribers and recent views, Apple chart position, and Apple review velocity.
The four platform signals
Spotify Followers: scaled logarithmically from 0 to 100 based on the show's Spotify follower count relative to the full catalog. Shows with 100,000+ followers score near the top of this component. YouTube Subscribers: scaled logarithmically from 0 to 100 based on the YouTube channel subscriber count. Recent YouTube Views: average views across the last 10 videos, also scaled logarithmically. This captures momentum better than subscriber count alone. Apple Chart Position: shows in the top 100 of any Apple Podcasts chart receive a scaled boost. Apple Review Velocity: the number of new reviews in the last 30 days, scaled to capture shows with active, growing listener communities.
How the components combine
Each component is scaled to 0-100 and then combined with the following weights: Spotify Followers (25%), YouTube Subscribers (20%), YouTube Recent Views (20%), Apple Chart Position (20%), Apple Review Velocity (15%). The result is a 0-100 Audience Score that updates whenever any component signal updates.
Audience tiers
Audience Score produces four tiers: Tier-One (score 75-100): flagship shows with large multi-platform audiences. Major (50-74): strong shows with meaningful cross-platform presence. Established (25-49): growing shows with at least one significant platform signal. Niche (0-24): early-stage or single-platform shows still building audience. Tier labels update whenever the underlying score recomputes.
How often it updates
Audience Score recomputes every 4 hours for podcasts with any recent signal update. Spotify follower data refreshes every 5 minutes (high frequency pipeline). YouTube data refreshes every 6 hours. Apple chart positions refresh every 6 hours. Apple review counts refresh every 2 hours. The score you see in PitchCentric reflects the most recent available data across all components.
Relationship to Pod Score
Audience Score feeds into Pod Score as one component (via the Listen Score pathway), but they are distinct metrics. Audience Score measures how big the audience is across platforms. Pod Score measures how valuable the show is as an outreach target, factoring in booking openness, email reachability, and platform presence together. A show can have a high Audience Score but a lower Pod Score if the host rarely books guests.
Related methodology pages
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