When Leticia Latino van Splunteren says she doesn’t look at her podcast statistics, it sounds like the familiar advice about ignoring metrics to protect your creative joy. But that’s not quite what she means. She does look at data. Just not the data most podcasters obsess over.

I think a lot of people get discouraged by seeing sometimes the numbers and the statistics, and I don’t look at them. I look at the map—of where it has been downloaded. And when I see it has been on every single continent, even if it’s 2 people in Africa I don’t care, but it is in Africa—that’s encouraging and empowering for me because I’ve reached a place that I will have never dreamt about reaching.

Two people in Africa. By any growth-focused metric, that’s nothing. It wouldn’t move a chart. It wouldn’t impress a sponsor. It wouldn’t even register as a blip in a monthly report.

But Latino van Splunteren sees something else entirely: reach. Not how many, but where. Not volume, but presence. Her show has touched every continent. That’s a different kind of achievement than download counts can capture.

This reframe reveals something worth examining. Most podcasters measure success the way businesses measure success—in aggregate numbers trending upward. Downloads this month versus last month. Unique listeners. Conversion rates. The implicit question is always “how many?” And because the answer is usually “not as many as I’d hoped,” the numbers become a source of discouragement.

But “where” tells a different story. A show that reaches two people in a country you’ve never visited has done something a show with ten thousand local listeners hasn’t. It has traveled. It has crossed borders, languages, time zones. Someone on the other side of the planet chose to spend thirty minutes with your voice in their ears. The number is tiny. The reach is enormous.

This isn’t about ignoring metrics—it’s about choosing which metrics matter. Download counts answer the question “how popular is my show?” Geographic spread answers a different question: “how far has my voice carried?” For podcasters whose goal is connection rather than scale, the second question might be more meaningful.

There’s also something psychologically different about looking at a map versus looking at a graph. A graph going up feels like success; a graph going flat feels like failure. But a map with dots scattered across continents? That feels like proof that you’ve made something that matters to people you’ll never meet, in places you may never go.

Latino van Splunteren has published over 250 episodes of Back2Basics. By her own account, she doesn’t monetize the show—it has nothing to do with her day job. The podcast exists because she loves the conversations. And when she needs encouragement, she doesn’t check whether the line is going up. She looks at the map and remembers that her work has traveled farther than she ever expected to go herself.

Maybe that’s the metric worth tracking: not how big your audience is, but how far your voice has reached.

This field note references the PodTalk podcast episode “Voices with Leticia Latino van Splunteren,” published March 22, 2024.