Members Who Listen Churn at Less Than Half the Rate
At Supporting Cast, we've long believed that subscribers who actually listen to their bonus episodes and ad-free feeds stick around longer. Indeed, since our earliest days, it’s been a top priority to make it as easy as possible for paying subscribers to listen to gated audio in their podcast app of choice.
We recently made it easy to observe churn data segmented by feed activation status, so we can actually see the difference between listeners and non-listeners in near real time, and the gap turns out to be even bigger than we expected. Subscribers who use their audio benefits are far less likely to churn than those who don’t.
What the Data Shows
Across six major partners — City Cast, Defector, The Dispatch, Slate, The Verge, and Vox — subscribers who had activated their audio benefits churned at an unweighted average of 1.3% a month. Subscribers who hadn't activated churned at 3%. Depending on the partner, listeners were somewhere between 28% and 81% less likely to cancel.
Those monthly differences compound. At these rates, about 350 of every 1,000 non-listeners would cancel within a year, compared with about 145 listeners. After three years, nearly three-quarters of the non-listeners would be gone, versus fewer than 40% of the listeners.
We looked specifically at our API-integrated partners — that is, publishers who run their own payments and memberships and use Supporting Cast solely to deliver the audio. (Audio-only subscriptions show the same pattern, but non-listeners are usually just a tiny fraction of subscribers there, so the data is noisier.)
For most of these partners, the podcast perk is one part of a bigger membership that also includes articles, newsletters, or other benefits. You might expect audio to get lost in that mix, but for the people who use it, it clearly doesn't.
To avoid sharing partner-specific churn data, the table below is anonymized. It’s worth noting that every partner’s churn rate falls below Recurly’s 4.14% benchmark for the digital media and entertainment industry.
We pulled churn on four dates: June 1, July 1, August 1, and September 1. Each pull looked back 30 days to understand what percentage of subscribers at the start of the period canceled during the 30-day window.
We averaged the four dates together so that one idiosyncratic month wouldn't skew the results. Even the smallest partner here has thousands of listeners and non-listeners, so none of these figures rests on a small sample.
Churn rates were segmented by feed activation status — anyone who has ever successfully downloaded a podcast episode in their app is considered a “listener” and anyone who has valid access to the audio benefits but has never downloaded an episode is considered a non-listener.
What It Means for Podcast Publishers
It’s notable how similar performance is for listeners across partners — each listener churn rate lands between 0.9% and 1.6% while the non-listener churn rates range from 2.4% all the way to 5.5%. Once people start listening, these very different publishers end up with very similar retention rates. The variation comes from the people who never connected their podcast app.
It’s fair to ask: does listening keep people around, or do loyal people just listen more? Probably some of both. Your most committed members are more likely to set up a private feed or connect Spotify in the first place.
But while we can't fully separate those two effects with this data, we know from experience that publishers have a massive influence on the rate at which subscribers access gated podcasts:
- You can't make someone love your newsletter, but you can make it easy for them to access what they're paying for in the place where they already listen.
- You can embed feed setup on your website, as these partners have done.
- You can put the feed setup link in the welcome email.
- You can make it a two-tap experience, as in the screenshot here.
- You can tell listeners on the show itself that the members-only feed exists.
The stakes are real. Imagine you have 1,000 subscribers paying $10 a month. If they churn like non-listeners, they'll bring in about $207,000 over three years. If they churn like listeners, it's about $289,000, roughly 40% more — and the gap will grow as churn rates compound with time.
Let Us Help Improve Your Retention
Supporting Cast works closely with partners to maximize feed access and minimize churn. If you’re launching a podcast subscription or adding audio benefits to an existing subscription, we can help to ensure subscribers actually listen to your gated episodes — so they don’t leave without realizing what they’ll be missing out on. Get in touch.
