It's not quite there yet. I made a calculation error and counted a total by accident. The real total now is around 48,000, so it's not that far off. It doesn't change much though; the highest number of downloads of a single episode are in excess of 5,300 and most posts get about 200 to 300 downloads.

The more important point is that by using Mininova posts I've been able to reach a wider audience than I could with just the RSS. And I've been getting other podcasters to warm to the idea of using Mininova to post episodes. After all, it's not important what your subsription number are, what's important is how many actually hear your podcasts.

I expect to be up to 50,000 in a few weeks.

That's the collective total number of downloads of all my podcast postings. Much of that has to do with Mininova and the torrents I've posted there; they've been more successful that I expected.

This number includes all the postings of Podcast Ping, including the Beowulf, The Silent Pen and The Gossip News. I only posted one episode of The Silent Pen to Mininova to see how it would perform but it's not been as popular as the others.

The Beowulf readings have done well, and The Gossip News has done better than expected, with one episode exceeding 2,000 downloads. I'm now considering developing a comedy podcast around The Gossip News which I may post in a week. I may be changing the feed address as well, but not the website.

The one thing I don't know is exactly how many unique downloaders there are. I know how many have downloaded each file, but I don't know if they have downloaded others. I'm assuming that those who have downloaded any of the Beowulf would have downloaded the others, so I'm going by the number who downloaded the first episode as a guide. That number is over 5,100 and growing. So I can assume at least that many have heard at least one of my podcasts. The actual number of listeners probably lies somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000. Either way, I can reasonably safely say that the podcasts have been heard by thousands.

Podcast Ping can be found at http://podcastping.blogspot.com

The Gossip News can be found at http://bluehotgossip.blogspot.com

The Silent Pen can be found at http://thesilentpen.blogspot.com