What is the "Download" metric?

Chartable uses the industry standard definition of a download: a device (a unique IP address and user agent combination) that downloads enough of an episode audio file to playback at least 60 seconds of audio.

That means that on any podcast player that uses your RSS feed (Apple, Castbox, an embeddable player on your website, etc), all of these cases would be counted as a download :

• A listener is subscribed to the podcast, and an episode is downloaded in full automatically when it is released
• A listener manually clicks the "download" button for an episode to listen later offline
• A listener presses "play" on an episode, and only plays it for 10 seconds, but 60 seconds of the episode is buffered
• A listener presses "play" on an episode, and plays the entire episode

Chartable captures downloads via the Trackable analytics prefix installed in your podcast's RSS feed.