Every podcaster agrees that it is good to get the discovery, for brand partnerships and for brag rights. However, most are in the dark over the different methods behind the charts on platforms such as Apple and Spotify. In general, there is a consensus that the ranking lists do not indicate the success or the overall audience of a show. All of this speaks for general metrics about metrics in the rapidly growing industry and the possibility that they could be manipulated.
In the industry, it is a feeling that the chart ranking is more of sudden contracting of subscribers than the full audience. The top podcast diagram from Spotify is updated daily and, according to companies, is determined by combining the total food counts and the number of recent clear listeners. According to Apple, the diagrams are updated during the day based on hearing, follow and completion rate.
In the meantime, YouTube, the most popular podcasting platform, has started its own top podcast charts in May and shows weekly after time.
Each podcast has its own provider data that can use agents and other metrics (such as social media supporters and repeat hearts) to sell the show. On platforms, however, the definitions of downloads, hearing or views can also differ, which makes it difficult to judge how popular a podist is actually.
Fixing in the current metrics has also led to a house industry of companies that enable podcasters to buy a certain number of downloads or followers. When asked how often this is used, Dan Misener, co-founder of the podcast marketing company bumpers, says he saw that it is “a lot”, especially for podcaster who want to rank on Apple's charts.
“The deeper problem in our industry around the measurement is that the scale is broken and the de -facto currency that uses podcasting forms some really perverse incentives, so that people hunt downloads or followers,” notes Misener.
Bill Simmons, head of the Talk strategy at Spotify and a popular podcast moderator, described it as one of the greatest challenges for podcasts. “I would say some of the larger shows lies publicly about their shops, lie over their podcast numbers and lie about their YouTube -Subs (by paying these subs). I cannot believe how many people about this stuff are dishonest” Th..
(Apple says that its diagrams take additional factors into account to make its ranking lists fair and that “the change of podcasts with the sole intention is to increase.
Downloads were viewed as an important industry metric, but these numbers are also shaky, since the changes in Apple's operating system continue to have a negative impact on the figures. Shows can also see an unexplained increase or a decrease in the downloads if you migrate the RSS feeds from one hosting platform to another in the context of a new deal. Since podcasts are increasingly consumed via video, the views are becoming increasingly important, while video episodes on Spotify and YouTube do not belong to downloads.
While the podcasts develop, the makers have adapted to live events, large brand shops and more that also fall into the overall calculation of the success of a show. For his part, Misener asks his podcasting customers to consider the entire audience, playback and the time for growth patterns.
This story appeared on August 13th of Hollywood Reporter Magazine. Click here to subscribe.