Gaming the system? Podcast publishers buying plays

• Podcast companies are buying short podcast plays within mobile game apps, causing official downloads of shows no one may be playing longer than twenty seconds according to Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. Time has also published the story outside a paywall.

  • Players get game tokens if they listen to a podcast for just twenty seconds. (Carman posts a graphic). But, because more than 60 seconds of audio are downloaded by the player, as demonstrated in this article in Sounds Profitable, these plays count as an IAB-certified download from podcast hosts and in prefix services like Podtrac. 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 is doing this? One ad company interviewed by Carman says its “main podcast client” is iHeartMedia. Here’s a video showing two podcast ads within Subway Surfers - the podcasts in the video are from Bloomberg, which distributes and monetises its shows using iHeart.

• Exclusive: Are these plays counting for iHeart’s “#1 for podcasting” Podtrac ranking? Podnews analysis confirms that the embedded podcast players used, as documented by DeepSee, make a call to Chartable and a call to Podtrac. Unless Podtrac filters out this traffic, the plays will count for iHeart’s ranking: we’ve asked Podtrac for comment. In 2018, Podnews discovered that iHeartMedia was embedding podcasts on their radio station websites, leading to inflated play counts.

• True crime podcaster MrBallen 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 Ajvide Lindqvist 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.

• Acast is to run a special cross-platform campaign for International Podcast Day, which is this Friday.

Moves and hires

• Gina Delvac is to lead KCRW’s new Podcast Audience Lab. She joins from Spotify, where she was Head of Studio 4.

Tips and tricks

• How many downloads per episode is “good”? Omny Studio publish their data.

• How can you get into Samsung Podcasts? Buzzsprout tell you how.

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