How We Count

How zPod counts downloads

zPod follows the IAB Podcast Measurement guidelines (v2.2) where noted below. It is not IAB certified.

1. Only GET requests for an episode's audio count. HEAD requests never count.
2. Only responses with status 200 (whole file) or 206 (part of the file) count.
3. Known bots and empty or malformed user agents are dropped.
4. Apple Watch (atc/* watchOS) paired-device duplicates are dropped.
5. Range probes of 0 or 1 byte are dropped.
6. A listener is one hashed IP address plus one hashed user agent. Partial (206) requests from the same listener for the same episode count once per UTC day, so play-pause-play is one download. A whole-file (200) request counts each time.
7. Unique listeners are one listener per episode per UTC day.
8. zPod does not yet apply the IAB one-minute byte threshold, a high-density NAT allowlist, or spike exclusion. Counts can therefore run higher than a certified host's for the same traffic.
9. Prefix analytics (such as the OP3 public prefix) are off unless the show turns them on.
10. Raw download rows keep a hashed IP address, the user agent, and the listener's country as a two-letter code, never the address itself. They are folded into daily totals within minutes and then deleted; the daily totals are what Studio shows.
11. Studio charts label stored UTC calendar days in the show's time zone. Changing the show's time zone does not rewrite stored days.
12. Each counted download is also added to a daily count by podcast app (read from the user agent) and by country. A download whose country is unknown, or that came over Tor, has no country. Days before app and country counting began have neither.

Measurement writes are included in the SaaS price, not a separate customer line item. Daily unique-download aggregates are what the product reports today.