Audience geography
What the geography numbers mean on each platform, how continents are rolled up, and why shares and counts are never mixed.
2 min read
GET /v1/shows/{show_id}/audience/geography returns where a show’s audience is, and GET /v1/analytics/geography combines shows. Both report each platform exactly as that platform reports it. Nothing is estimated, and different platforms are never blended into one number.
One platform, one metric
#Each entry is one platform and one metric, because platforms measure different things:
| Platform | metric | Kind | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify | plays_share: share of Spotify plays | share (Spotify gives no counts) | Spotify’s last 30 days at the last sync |
| Apple Podcasts | unique_devices, top 5 countries (plus top cities) | count | all time |
| YouTube | views and watch time, top 25 countries (plus US states) | count | the last 30 days |
followers, top 8 countries (Instagram professional sign-in, accounts with 100+ followers) | count | current snapshot | |
simplecast | downloads, top 5 countries | count | all time |
megaphone | downloads and streams, as two entries | count | the report’s dates |
captivate, blubrry | downloads | count | 90 days, 30 days |
Use metric_description, window and as_of as the label for every chart: a YouTube views map and a Spotify plays-share map answer different questions. Connected platforms that don’t report geography (TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, newsletters and some hosts) come back with available: false and a reason.
Shares and counts
#value_kind says what a value is:
count: a number of views, devices, followers or downloads.shareis that country’s part of the countries listed.share: a percentage the platform reports directly. There is no count behind it to show or add. Spotify hides very small countries as<1%, which stays blank invalue_label.
share_basis says what a share is a share of: platform_total (the platform’s own percentage of all its listeners) or listed_countries (the share of the countries the platform listed, such as Apple’s top 5, which is not the share of the whole audience).
Never add across entries
Don’t add a Spotify share to YouTube views, or two platforms’ counts together into one “audience”. Each entry stands alone.
Continents
#continents is summed from the listed countries with a fixed country-to-continent map. Counts are added; shares are added as shares of the same platform. Countries a platform didn’t list (beyond its top 5, 8 or 25, or Spotify’s <1%) are not in the sum, and hidden_share_countries says how many countries had a hidden share.
Across shows
#GET /v1/analytics/geography groups by platform and metric and says how it combined shows in aggregation:
sum_of_countsfor counts: each country’s counts are added across shows, andshareis the country’s part of that total. A country outside a show’s listed top countries adds nothing for that show.unweighted_mean_of_show_sharesfor Spotify shares: each country’s share is the plain average across shows, every show weighted equally, with a country a show doesn’t list counting as 0.
When two shows share one platform account, it is counted once (counted: false and same_source_as on the second). shows_included lists each show’s window and as_of; shows_missing says why a show is left out.
Geography endpoints cost two requests against the rate limit, like other analytics.