How We Gamed Our Way Into Apple's Top 50 Podcasts...
Steffan Garrero
Senior Lecturer in Sport Media at Cardiff Metropolitan University Founder & Director at Nata Media Ltd
Everybody wants to be “The Best One”, don’t they?
Best Film, Best Documentary, Best Whatever.
Number One in the eyes of others.
The Media Industry is too often about the external approval of a creation.
Some creators depend on that.
Without a strong chart position, their next commission might not happen.
The focus on the extrinsic motivation takes over.
The intrinsic gets lost.
An email landed in my inbox a few weeks ago asking whether I’d be interested in a company “helping” a podcast I make to remain high up in the Apple Podcast Charts.
Chart positions fluctuate and the podcast in question – The Socially Distant Sports Bar does quite well.
It moves in and out of the Top 20 of Sport, Top 200 in UK.
There never seems to be much correlation between the chart position and the download/streaming figures.
I’d been told that these charts are collated via an algorithm rather than it being about downloads alone.
But to most people, most downloaders and many in the industry, if you’re the number 1 Podcast on Apple that means that you get the most listeners.
I didn’t reply to the email, but it made me think about how they’d do it and whether I could do it myself.
It made me think about all forms of digital broadcasting and whether the numbers could be trusted or needed more scrutiny.
It made me think that my students needed to know more about this side of the business they want to work in.
It made me think that everything is game-able.
I spoke to some people within the industry and picked up a few anonymised tips.
“New Podcasts often crack the Top 10 and then drop off. So it’s safe to assume that New Subscribers have an influence on Chart Positions.”
“If you get New Reviews and 5 Star Ratings it will 100% make the podcast surface better.”
I took to Twitter and set up an experiment.
I created own click farm.
On the day we started the experiment the podcast was outside of the Top 200 in the UK and at Number 34 in the Sports Chart.
With around 13,000 potential clickers, raters and reviewers following the Twitter account it was time to sit back on watch what happened.
I thought we understood the formula and thought we’d move up the charts.
But I wasn’t prepared for just how game-able this chart was.
Within 7 hours of the experiment in had burst into the Top 200 and moved up 15 spots in the Sports chart.
After a day we were riding high in Sports and starting to climb up the Top 200 pretty rapidly.
My aim wasn’t to increase the listenership – far from it.
My aim wasn’t to increase awareness of the pod or to push it in front of potential advertisers or sponsors.
But higher prominence leads to brand recognition which could potentially lead to all of the above happening.
Is this a form of free advertising/marketing?
What fascinated me was that our obvious click farming didn’t raise any alarm bells.
I assumed we would be “found out” and dropped back down the charts. But we kept on rising.
Launching a new episode seemed to turbo charge the experiment – so downloads + ratings, reviews and new subscriptions works even better.
To prove that we didn’t manipulate the chart in any way via downloads – here’s a chart of our regular weekly pattern of downloads.
The big peaks are the days we release episodes – the peak on the 9th of November is no different to any other week.
The podcast is now dropping back down the charts and whatever part of my brain is extrinsically motivated wants to carry on clicking.
Despite proving that it really means nothing.
The quality of the product didn’t change.
The number of downloads didn’t change.
Just a number on an app.
It shouldn’t mean anything, especially when it can be so blatantly altered.
How many companies watch their own content?
How many watch it so many times it manipulates the popularity?
How many watch it so many times it creates future commissions?
Careers, commissions and validity shouldn’t rely purely on manipulable numbers.
Quality, craft and the intrinsic satisfactions need to mean more – to the creators and commissioners alike.
Fascinating experiment
Senior Advocacy Manager, Climate Outreach; Podcaster.
1yfascinating. but I have a counter-view as well. For indie podcasters, you will never get any profile *at all* if the charts only reflected raw download numbers. Manipulable yes, but there's something I quite like about the idea of 'charts' (maybe we need a better word) that is reflecting where there is something relatively dynamic happening around a particular podcast. also, presumably, it gets much harder to manipulate your way into the charts in perpetuity. You will run out of people you can ask for the favour of giving the show a review.
We create podcasts that scale and sell | Free Training in Profile
2yCool experiment for sure. And just so you know, those guys that emailed you -- more than likely what they would have done is spammed a Apple Podcasts link for your show to 10's of thousands of Apple email accounts. I had a long call with one of these guys to try and figure out what they were doing and if there was a non-scam way to replicate it. After about an hour of poking he told me they have over a million email address in various countries and they send you podcast out in batches of 10,000 sends. So, not replicatable in a non-spam way.
Senior Lecturer & Sports TV Live Producer/ Exec Prod
2yThis is class Steff. I’m calling it “frontier pedagogy”. Bringing live, real world, hands on, active, engaging media analysis & research into the classroom.
Award Winning Podcast Producer & Strategist
2yAwesome insight! We switched to a daily show and got to the No1 trending spot after about 12 days on Spotify. No idea of the mechanics. It was totally meaningless except to say we did it once.