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The podcast “ranking” company revised its November rankings after James Cridland spent a day analyzing how the Us Weekly Hot Hollywood podcast cracked the top five, seemingly out of nowhere.
After an entire day of research Cridland discovered that the numbers for Us Weekly included Android Users just visiting a website and never actually playing the podcast. Podtrac originally responded to Cridland that they’d checked and everything was absolutely fine. Nothing to see here Jim. They suggested Us Weekly had come up with an exciting new business model for podcasts.
Also, we did not originally report this on December 16 but it’s important to point it out now. When Podtrac originally released its November podcast chart, what it sent out was the exact same chart as October. Same podcasts, same exact download numbers. And, that same chart was posted to its website. We pointed that out to Podtrac executives, who did not respond to us, but wound up releasing a new chart two hours later. That new chart included the US Weekly Hot Hollywood debacle that Cridland uncovered this week.
You may recall, back in January, Podtrac also had issues with credibility when unique streams and downloads were not included in their numbers. That lead to a revision in their numbers to include those two metrics.
In a release this morning Podtrac called Cridland’s effort to uncover their inaccurate numbers “heroic” without taking any responsibility for reporting the false numbers.
One of the major problems with Podtrac is their lack of transparency and refusal to respond to any questions or inquires about their charts. That will continue to be a problem for the industry as podcasting continues to grow and advertisers look for a reliable charting source.
We’d show you their revised November chart but we cannot guarantee their accuracy.
Comments:
Bummer… I was going to use their service.