The battle of the one-star reviews

• Exclusive: There’s been a significant increase in one-star reviews in Apple Podcasts since 1st July, according to analytics company Chartable, which tracks rankings and reviews across a number of podcast directories. Of the most one-voted, four of the top ten shows are true crime podcasts, including the #1.

  • Obscura had over 663 one-star ratings by Sunday (without a review). A number of those ratings still appear in the US store at the time of going to press.
  • Not to worry. Ratings don’t count for the Apple Podcast trending chart. Apple Podcasts is only used by 50% of podcast listeners anyway.

• Fireside is changing its stats to better align with the IAB standards, it’s told its customers in a newsletter. The company tells us it’s currently considering IAB certification.

• The open-source podcast directory gPodder is looking for a new maintainer before the end of the year. It’s integrated into several podcast clients.

  
  Aug 15 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• “This Podcaster Is Charging His Guests $275 Per Session, and They Seem to Love It” covers mürmur, from Uluç Ülgen. You also get a Turkish fortune-reading thrown in. Hidden in the story: landlords got concerned with the amount of strangers he had visiting to guest on his podcast, and he was thrown out - twice.

• Has the true crime podcast Hide and Seek forced a confession?

Developers

• Exclusive: If you’re seeing podcasts downloaded by a user-agent called googlebot-video - Google have confirmed that this useragent is used to index audio for all Google products including Google Podcasts. “The audio is used as a signal for ranking and recommendation,” said Zack Reneau-Wedeen to us. They’ve told us they plan to update their developer’s guide. (You should probably categorise it as a bot).
• The above change is in an open user-agents list on Github. There’s an accompanying Slack group - if you’d like an invite, reply to this email.

Podcasts

Scale Up is back for season 3; a show about startups founded in Melbourne VIC, Australia, scaling up to global success. This season is about Envato (like eBay, but for digital things). (LaunchVic / Courtney Carthy / Omny Studio)

There is no perfect pregnancy, birth, or parent, but you’d never know, according to the media. Unspoken Stories features real stories from the joys of parenthood to what happens when things don’t go according to plan. (March of Dimes / ART19)

The Screenster Podcast is an industry-insider look at the film and television world. Host and actress Georgie Grier talks to her guests about their careers, the highs and lows of this business and the good stuff on our screens. (Libsyn)

Birthday Skin is a skincare podcast “on a mission to make skincare less confusing and mundane”. Charlie and Amy feature research to bust some myths, and aim to give you “glowy skin”. (Entale)

9XM SoundcastE is a music podcast with a difference: from India’s largest music channel network, it’s an interview with some of Bollywood’s biggest music stars. (IVM Podcasts / Libsyn)