I recently relaunched a podcast that had been dormant for a few years. All of the old shows had been taken offline quite some time ago, and instead of bringing hose episodes back, I decided to do a full reboot, starting over at episode one. I had used Blubrry stats with this show before and wanted to do so again. But when I logged into my Blubrry account, I noticed that these old shows were still being tracked by the stats system, even tho they were no longer online. (I’m guessing this was caused by external sites that had cached the media URL’s, and that most of the hits came from bots pinging those sites.) I wanted to get an accurate count of only the new shows, so I needed to remove all of the old shows from the system. Here’s how I did it. (Hat tip to the Blubrry forum for pointing me in the right direction.)
1.) Log into your Blubrry account, click the “manage account” link at the top of the page.
2.) Mouse over the “measure” link in the top toolbar of the next page, click “media statistics” from the menu that pops up.
3.) Click the “Browse Episodes” link on the left-hand side of the page.
4.) When the “Select Episode” box comes up, mouse over to the left of an episode you’d like to remove and click on the notepad icon that pops up:
5.) The “Edit Episode” box comes up next. Click the gray button next to “Exclude Episode From Reports” so the button turns green. Click the “Save” button underneath and the site will take you back to your main media stats page. That’s it. You’re done! You can repeat the process if you have other episodes you’d like to remove from further stats tracking:
Keep in mind that stats already reported for episodes that have been removed won’t be removed from the total number of downloads you’ll see when you first log in. If you remove a lot of old episodes (as I did), you can still get a decent idea of total current downloads by using some of the date-based stats views found in the left-hand sidebar of your main statistics page.
Posted by Shawn Thorpe
If you looked at those old stats closely, you can see they where not gaining any more downloads. What you where seeing was the data from when the shows where active. The display you show above is the grand total of downloads from when it was live.
Bots are filtered out so their is no Bot data in the stats.
Thanks for the clarification. I can tell you that, before I removed the old shows from tracking, some of them episodes were still getting counts as late as this month. But, the files probably hadn’t been online since at least 2011. I’m not sure why that is, nor do I consider it to be a problem in my case. I just didn’t want those old episodes (for whatever reason) to still be counted.