Podtrac remove iHeartMedia data after podnews report

• Yesterday, we reported on highly inflated figures from iHeartMedia on Podtrac’s charts. Nine hours later, Podtrac silently removed iHeartMedia from all of their ratings charts. The company notes on their revised release: “Preloading podcast content is prohibited under IAB podcast measurement guidelines.” The new data and statement was not sent to their report mailing list.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Jul 29 2023
  • Six hours after they removed the figures, they email us: “Thank you for your well researched blog post of earlier today, and for the time and attention you’ve given our Podtrac rankings. We wanted to let you know that we have a variety of processes to proactively look for anomalous download behavior, but in this case, we missed iHeart’s preload behavior via its affiliate websites. We have restated our October and November 2017 rankings on our website, and we have added more checks to our processes to prevent this in the future. We have also added documentation to reiterate the IAB’s guidelines prohibiting preloading of podcast content via website players.”
  • We’re grateful for their prompt action, and have made a technical suggestion that may allow compliant pre-loading in future.

• The revised Podtrac analytics show The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe as the US’s most popular short-form podcast.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Jul 29 2023

• Sweden: a switch by Libsyn to use IAB-approved analytics meant that the figures for the largest podcast in the country, by Alex Schulman and Sigge Eklund, went down by 38% according to Swedish site Breakit. “Both the 750,000 and the 650,000 download number are grossly incorrect, Breakit can reveal,” it said in a story from November 23. Sweden have already fixed this: they have a national weekly podcast data portal using IAB podcast measurement standards as we reported on November 20.

• And even more on analytics: audioBoom is switching to use IAB metrics. An FAQ for publishers says: “Your listener numbers will likely be lower in your dashboard, but you aren’t actually losing listeners. What may appear to be a decrease in listeners is really just a more accurate assessment of your audience.” Of tangential interest: the FAQ also says that new app Castbox measures listening within its own app “for greater accuracy”.

  
  Jul 29 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Hernan Lopez from podcast network Wondery is interviewed by AdExchanger. He predicts Google will launch a podcast app, and is concerned about attribution for direct advertising in podcasting.

• Germany: comedian and author Heinz Strunk is making a podcast for Spotify, promoted by the service as the “first fictional Spotify Original Podcast”. There are ten episodes, each around fifteen minutes long. It’s called Heinz Strunks Familienaufstellung and it’s here.

  
  Jul 29 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Steven Goldstein posts some stats on today’s podcasting landscape as an aid to consider where 2018 will take us. “It has taken podcasting about 12 years to get to 60% of general public awareness. Smart Speakers have hit that mark in one year.”

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Jul 29 2023

• We have a number of Spanish readers - one that even translated our long iHeartMedia article from yesterday into a Twitter thread - so here is Nuestros 10 Podcasts favoritos de 2017, the “nuestros” in this case being Cuonda, a US-based Spanish podcast platform.

• A good piece from podcast social media company Gretta about “speechtext” - transcription of podcasts into text. “You think you want [to read podcasts], but you really don’t. Reading speechtext sucks. Right now, anyhow.”

Thank you to Allyson Marino, Jason DeFillippo, Robbie MacInnes and Mirko Lagonegro, Pat Hannon, Andrew Davies, Alexander Laurin, Brad Smart, Jake Shapiro, George Bradt, and Andy Maher for your support.