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You may recall that last week we covered the chart manipulation story when The Verge went in depth on how podcasts on the Apple chart could be easily moved up the rankings for only $5.00.
The Verge wrote about how WBUR’s John Perotti tested out one of the click farms and watched his obscure podcast make it all the way to number two. We reached out to Perotti to ask him a few questions of our own.
Perotti is the Manager of Podcast Production at WBUR in Boston.
PBJ: What made you decide to give this a try and spend the $5? Perotti: I honestly just wanted to see if it would work. I had a non-professional podcast gathering dust and said “let’s see!”
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Perotti’s podcast is called WAVes[/caption]
PBJ: What went through your mind when you saw your podcast climbing? **Perotti: **How the heck are they doing this? Is my podcast going to get banned? Eventually I thought, what’s stopping anyone from doing this?
PBJ: Do you believe that what happened to you is happening a lot? Perotti: Hard to say for sure. I had a conversation with a guy Darknet Diaries host Jack Rhysider. He dove in deeper, and the episode that just came out has some pretty surprising revelations about it. He may have found some evidence that big name podcasts are doing this (LISTEN TO THAT EPISODE HERE.. Jack found out exactly how the Apple Podcast charts are being corrupted. Podcasters are hiring people in Bangladesh to subscribe through iTunes over and over again using thousands of AppleIDs. For little money completely unknown podcasts are getting on the top 200 charts.) That said, if you are already getting a lot of international downloads, it’s probably much harder to pick out the purchased downloads/streams/subscriptions against the organic ones. Final answer: maybe.
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John Perotti[/caption]
PBJ: What is your advice to podcasters that obsess over those charts? Perotti: I think we’ve all been there, and for some of us, it’s an important part of the discovery process. Further, being at the top of the charts can help in getting advertisers or subscribers in to pay attention to you in some cases. That said, it still seems the best way to get listeners is to advertise in other podcasts or have your content featured on other podcasts. You can cheat for five bucks, or do some research and connect with potential listeners in a more meaningful way.
PBJ Note: We interviewed Jack Rhysider about his podcast Darknet Diaries. That 30-minute podcast will be posted tomorrow.
We reached out to Podcast Movement Co-Founder Dan Franks to get his thoughts on what’s happening on the Apple chart. He tells PBJ that unfortunately pretty much anything can be gamed these days. “We often see people finding ways to inflate their social media presence, it’s pretty well known that there are ways that our elections can (and probably have been) manipulated, and yes, people have found ways to game their Apple Podcasts rankings. Most everyone who is a podcast producer has likely been solicited one, or more likely a few dozen, times by so called “podcast promoters” who promise to raise your rankings in Apple Podcasts for as little as $5. Unfortunately, the few who I’ve known to take them up on it on an experimental basis, report back that the tactics are actually working. It does appear there is a very systemized, and likely automated, process that these services are going through to basically rank shows at the flip of a switch. The good news is that it’s almost as easy to spot these fake rankers as it is to become one. So either they can be publicly outed, or more likely Apple will begin to spot them easily and start punishing them appropriately. Ultimately, I don’t think that these rankings play a big enough role in widespread podcast discovery, and thus the harm being done is really just on the surface level, with the end result simply casting a black eye on the abusers themselves.
Comments:
I once had a podcast called Battling Bands. It cost $2 to join. You “battled” another band, and if you won, you get to battle another band. In a nutshell, there was almost no prize, and I could see that while a few CDs were being purchased, there wasn’t a ton of traffic being generated. Yet the level of effort that was put forth was insane. I went through probably six different voting scripts and EVERY SINGLE ONE was gamed. I had to spend a ton of time to weed out the fake votes, and what was supposed to be a cool, fun, marketing tool became a technical nightmare that quickly wiped out any return on investment. If you have any kind of award, or chart, people will lose their mind obsessing over it.