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Should The Industry Trust The Podtrac Charts?

· Time to read: ~2 min

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The folks at Podtrac have gone AWOL – and they certainly have some explaining to do about their tracking numbers. On Friday, several podcasting executives reached out to us to let us know something fishy was going on at Podtrac.

Podtrac calls itself the “standard for podcast analytics.”

When several people noticed Podtrac did not include downloads in the charts released for January, we reached out to several people in the company, including CEO Mark McCreary, to find out what was going on.

McCreary ignored our requests completely on Friday.

The Vice President for Podcast Analytics at Podtrac referred us to Julia Price, who handles media inquiries. Price also ignored us all day Friday. So much for handling media inquiries.

Toward the end of the day Friday we did receive a very strange e-mail from the VP of Analytics. Here’s what it said: “We are reevaluating the information provided on the rankings. There is a link at the bottom of the post requesting feedback to that end.”

So they did not explain what was going on but they did want us to provide feedback on their charts.

That’s just weird!

You have to wonder how reliable the Podtrac numbers are if they make a major change to their charts, do not notify clients, and refuse to answer any questions about what’s going on. You also have to wonder if advertisers are looking at these charts and making buys based on what they see every month.

The editorial team here at The Podcast Business Journal has decided not to run the charts going forward.

Comments:

Dave Jackson -

Keep in mind this has NEVER been an Industry report but “Rankings of podcasts that use the Podtrac redirect” didn’t have the same kind of ring to it.


#### [James Cridland](https://podnews.net "james@cridland.net") -

They showed themselves as incapable of properly checking their chart at the beginning of last year. https://podnews.net/article/iheartmedia-analytics-are-wrong


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