By Michaela Gordoni
You might think that the top podcasts are rated as such due to their total number of listeners, downloads, or total number of hours listened to, but depending on the platform, that might be wrong.
The Hollywood reporter says it’s not clear how top podcasts are being ranked. There’s an estimate that rankings are influenced by sudden subscriber growth. Spotify ranks podcasters by a “combination of overall follower counts and the number of recent unique listeners.”
However, Apple ranks its daily charts by “listening, follows and completion rate.” Then there’s YouTube, the top podcasting platform, which ranks by weekly watch time.
When metrics differ across platforms, its hard to estimate podcasters’ true popularity. Dan Misener, a co-founder of podcast marketing firm Bumper, says he sees “a lot” of podcasters purchase downloads and followers, especially to boost their ranking on Apple’s charts.
“The deeper problem within our industry around measurement is that the yardstick is broken, and the de facto currency that podcasting uses sets up some really perverse incentives, such that people chase downloads or followers,” Misener explained.
Bill Simmons, head of talk strategy at Spotify and a podcast host, takes it a step further.
“I’d say some of the bigger shows lying publicly about their deals, lying about their podcast numbers and lying about their YouTube subs (by paying for those subs). I can’t believe how many people are dishonest about this stuff,” Simmons said.
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One way podcasters are buying listeners is through gaming ads. Time reported that each time a player taps an in-game ad, a podcast episode downloads on their device.
Larry Chiagouris, a marketing professor at Pace University commented, “I’m not saying [this tactic is] not ethical or illegal, but it raises issues. If someone is trying to play a game and that’s the purpose of this interaction, they may just be eager to play the game and are not that interested in the information being shared.”
In 2022, Bloomberg investigated Subway Surfers podcast downloads and found that iHeartMedia was using this tactic for downloads. Interestingly, the iHeart podcasts represented more than half of the top 10 shows in the podcast charts in the last week of August 2022. None of the shows had published any new content and one them hadn’t released new material for over a year, The Podcast Host reported.
With no standardized way to represent metrics and with so much diversity across platforms, it’s going to remain easy for podcasters to fudge their way around to look popular. And is it right? … Not really.
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