TAP Listener Data

We are officially in to our second year and we could not be more excited about the podcast. The positive response to our show from a an unexpectedly huge range of radiation oncologists and other professionals has been a highlight of each of our careers. Thank you for supporting this effort!

One of our original goals was broaden the range of loud voices in Radiation Oncology. Scientific journal content is mostly written by academics and #RadOnc Twitter “influencers” are overwhelmingly North American male radiation oncologists.

Did we achieve our goal? In my opinion, we’re off to a decent start with a lot of room to improve.

Let’s look at some data.

As of 9/20/22, the Accelerators Podcast has 29 episodes and 13,842 listens. Each episode has a mean of 477 listens, range 368 to 1184.

Here are the counts for the top 5 episodes.

It’s worth noting that there is some time bias as older episodes accumulate listens over time. However, the vast majority of listens come right away. Here is a plot of accumulated listens over time for The One About Jobs:

It’s always fun to share device and app data. Hello to the 24 of you Overcast on iPhone users (not shown), you have excellent taste!

We also decided to look at guest gender diversity. While not sufficient to achieve our goal, it is necessary, and it is a narrow, focused question that can be explored in a blog post.

Here are the number of episodes and mean listens for episodes that had mixed, men-only, and women-only guests. There were two episodes with Anna, Simul and/or I.

Despite intentional efforts to feature guests who are women, 13/29 episodes had all male guests. This could be due to the fact that we have thus far (unintentionally) focused on hosting radiation oncologists and that we find them mostly on Twitter.

Also, we noticed that, on average, episodes with women only guests have less listens than hosts with men only guests. This is true for our episodes where men-only and women-only guest slates covered the same topic (paternal leave “woman” at 383 and “men” at 419).

We do not know the significance of these differences, but we are happy to share the raw data and, of course, talk about it on the show! We also acknowledge that LGBTQ+ issues in Radiation Oncology extend well outside the topic of representation of women on our podcast, and hope to talk about that soon as well.

Finally, we looked at where our listeners are located. We’re happy to announce Houston, TX is #1 in both cancer treatment and listening to The Accelerators Podcast!

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority are listening in from the US (87%).

The remaining 13% of our listens come from over 70 countries! Here are the top 10.

In season 2, we hope to become broader and louder. While amplifying important issues and radiation oncologists will remain a core focus, we hope to host more doctors from outside the US as well as non-physician radiation oncology professionals.

Thanks listeners for the support so far, and we look forward to our future together!