Gaming the system, the latest from our daily newsletter at PodNews, don't it?
Podcast companies are buying short podcast plays within mobile game apps, causing official
downloads of shows no one may be playing longer than 20 seconds, according to Bloomberg's
Ashley Carmen today.
Players get game tokens if they listen to a podcast for just 20 seconds, but because
more than 60 seconds of audio are downloaded by the player, those plays count as an IAB certified
download from podcast hosts and in prefix services like PodTrack that allows podcasts promoted
in this way to charge for the ads delivered in the show and for that traffic to be counted
in rankers.
Who's doing this?
One ad company interview says its main podcast client is iHeartMedia, so are those plays
counting for iHeart number one for podcasting, PodTrack ranking.
Our analysis exclusively confirms today that the embedded podcast players used do make
a call to Charitable and a call to PodTrack.
So unless PodTrack filter out this traffic, the players will count for iHeart's ranking.
We've asked PodTrack for comment.
In 2018, we discovered that iHeartMedia was embedding podcasts on their radio station
websites leading to inflated play counts.
In other news, true crime podcaster Mr. Ballon has signed with Amazon Music, unlike
previous Amazon Music podcast deals like Smartless, it appears to be an exclusive deal
that will remove the show from other platforms.
A new show has launched, but to listen to it, you'll need to travel to Sweden, using
geofencing a new audio story from John Ajveda Linkfist can only be played if you're in
the Swedish forest where the story is set, it's produced by Visit Sweden.
CNN has laid off a number of podcast staff, the PRX journalism podcast accelerator has
welcomed its debut participants from across the US, and a cast is to run a special cross-platform
campaign for international podcast day, which is this Friday.
In people used Gina Delvatch's to lead KCRW's new podcast audience lab, she joins from
Spotify where she was head of Studio 4, and in podcast news, the award-winning armchair
adventures has been picked by Virgin Atlantic to be the airline's first in-flight children's
podcast.
The show is made with elderly people across Manchester, and has been described as a positive
podcast by the BBC, and the PRX is the first long-form podcast series from the Economist.
Xi Jinping is the most powerful man in the world.
He's ruled for 10 years in China, and he's said to break convention by securing a third
term at next month's Communist Party Congress.
He could rule for life, but we hardly know anything about him.
The Economist's China correspondent, Sue Lin Wong, cuts through the propaganda and the censorship
to figure out what makes him tick.
And that's the latest from our newsletter to read all the stories and subscribe where
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