Is It Possible to Game the Apple Podcast Charts?
Last updated on February 19th, 2018
Recently, the New York Times did an exposé about the underground market of buying Twitter followers — exposing the companies who control bots and can add followers and retweets for a price. Unsurprisingly, a number of high- and low-profile celebrities along with several businesses were listed as buying followers. A good number of them expressed the business benefits to buying fake followers. Your Twitter profile appears to be more popular and will attract more real people. What this sparked for me, however, was curiosity in an unrelated subject. I had long suspected there was a particular podcast that was gaming (or buying) it’s way on to the don’t-call-it-iTunes, Apple Podcasts charts.
Every week, I look at the top ten podcasts from Apple Podcasts and keep a running tally of the podcasts appearing on the charts. You see your usual suspects like This American Life, The Daily, Pod Save America, The Joe Rogan Experience, the recent big true crime podcast, and a few others typically show up. However, there’s one podcast that always appears out of place. Intrigued, I started to look more into it, mostly because of curiosity rather than to stifle someone’s business. I was genuinely curious: in this time of podcast abundance, how can someone market their way to the top?
By following the Apple Podcast charts, you also quickly learn a little bit about how the Apple algorithm works. New podcasts often crack the top ten but then fall off, so it’s rational to assume growth rates and new subscribers are among one of the factors that go into podcast ranking. Though nobody outside of Apple knows the true weighting or factors that ultimately determine the rankings, Rob Walch of Libsyn, validates my anecdotal evidence and says Apple Podcasts charts are “100% about the total number of new subscribers in the past 7 days, with a weighted average for the last 24, 48, and 72 hours.” This makes sense to keep the list fresh with new and popular podcasts: only the absolute best and consistent podcasts remain on the top 10.
Enter my point of interest: Kickass News. The following details are public data points I’ve gathered and should be treated as circumstantial evidence. I’m not directly accusing them of manipulating the charts, but I believe there’s enough circumstantial evidence to suggest it’s a possibility.
The raw numbers don’t quite do this justice. Look how Kickass News compares to these three other podcasts and specifically how well it’s grouped over the last six months. These graphs show daily rank on the y-axis, so the lower the better.
Though I’ve long been interested in how someone could manipulate the iTunes charts, I never dedicated the time to research and track how it could happen. That’s when I thought of Twitter Audit. I ran their handle (@KickassNewsPod), which boasts nearly 90,000 followers, through the service. According to Twitter Audit, only 22% of their followers are real — the rest are fake and could have been purchased by one of the companies the NYT article featured.
Another telling sign is to correlate Apple Podcasts’ top podcasts chart with the top 200 episodes chart. The episodes chart, according to Walch, is based on new daily plays and downloads; therefore, it’s a more accurate measure of listeners. If, for example, a podcast got a lot of new subscribers on a given day — enough to validate their spot within the top podcasts chart — they should also have at least one episode inside the top 200 chart. As of February 15th, Kickass News has zero episodes within the top 200, yet are listed as the 5th podcast. For comparison’s sake, The Daily is listed as the 7th top podcast today. They have five podcasts inside the top 200 including number 1, 6, and 17. In fact, since February 1st, I couldn’t find one podcast listed in the top 10 that didn’t have at least one episode inside the top 200, except Kickass News. Unfortunately, I can’t locate historical data on the episode charts like I can with the podcast charts. I question whether Kickass News has ever cracked the top 200.
Because podcast analytics are still in their elementary stage and mostly private, it’s impossible to know if there’s a large differential between their subscribers and their download numbers. Without this key piece of evidence, this remains only a theory.
How It’s Possible to Game the Apple Podcast Charts
As Walch quoted above, the rankings are dependent on new podcast subscribers. So in order to appear on the charts, you need to have an influx of new subscribers on a daily basis. It’s possible Kickass News is constantly finding untapped audiences to subscribe, but there’s also a chance they’re employing some other tactic to create new subscriptions. Unless they have a fairly large network of family and friends willing to unsubscribe and resubscribe on a daily basis — enough to get above the Apple threshold — my best guess is they’re either using some sort of click farm service or built a custom script to have bots subscribe.
A click farm is a service where groups of workers constantly click on a given link for a period of time. Though this is mostly used as an online advertising fraud, it’s also used to artificially inflate traffic, load test websites, or as popularized by HBO’s Silicon Valley, make it seem like your user count is higher than it actually is. Moreover, Amazon admitted this was an issue in the past with publishers using click farms to inflate their ranks in the Kindle store. If Kickass News is willing to buy fake Twitter followers, is it a stretch to think they might employ a click farm too?
Because the Apple charts in question are US-specific, the new subscribers have to be based in the US which could make the click farm theory less likely. Most click farms are based outside the US, and while there are ways to mask where the subscribers are coming from this might be more hassle than it’s worth. I initially didn’t think a custom script would be possible because it would take a lot of unique Apple IDs to appear as new individual subscribers. However, after scouring developer forums, a script to create Apple IDs has been successfully created in the past. Theoretically, you could duplicate this script, create new Apple accounts, and have them subscribe to any given podcast.
Either of these tactics could also explain not only their ranking, but the consistency of the ranks as well. Both operate on previously agreed upon numbers, i.e. they’re subscribing to the podcast a specific number of times each day, resulting in unnaturally consistent rates. This, in a vacuum, would result in the same daily ranking, but given the other podcasts in the market, there’s just enough variance to not raise any suspicions.
Looking at the entire history of Kickass News supports this theory. According to iTunesCharts, until January 23, 2017, Kickass News was technically a different podcast which labeled the host, Ben Mathis, as the production company. On the 23rd, however, Mathis Entertainment launched the new Kickass News. What you can see in the data could be viewed as a testing ground. If you’re using a script and unsure how many new subscriptions you need to crack the charts but not seem suspicious, you need to start in small doses and work your way up. Should you start with 1,000 new subscriptions or 100,000? Someone like me wouldn’t know and would require some trial and error, but Walch told me, “It doesn’t take much to get up there. Typically 5,000 new subscribers in a day will get you to top 3. I saw a podcast with 979 downloads in the first day crack the top 15.”
What I should state here though, is that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The podcast landscape right now is akin to the wild west — it’s one of the reasons Discover Pods exists. Podcast creators need to do everything they can to get noticed and build an audience. What Kickass News may or may not be doing is an innovative tactic and should be treated as such. In Silicon Valley, this would be called a “growth hack” and cheered as a good business technique. As far as I know, there’s nothing illegal about this tactic so instead of criticizing Kickass News, we should applaud them for taking advantage of a loophole.
Since there’s no way of knowing with 100% certainty if Kickass News is gaming the charts, I decided to reach out to Ben Mathis, founder and host of Kickass News. Unfortunately, all my requests for comments were ignored.
I went to Walch with my click farm theory. What I was most surprised about is how unsurprised he was. He told me of a similar story of a now-defunct podcast using a Malaysian click farm who was able to mask their location and appear in the US using a virtual private network (VPN). Walch also said something that supported the podcast chart and episode chart disparity that’s stuck with me. “If a top 10 podcast doesn’t have at least one episode in the top 200 within 24-36 hours of releasing a new episode it’s suspicious.” Again, throughout researching this story, Kickass News has never had a top 200 episode.
Objectively, here’s what we know:
- An overwhelming amount of Kickass News Twitter followers are fake.
- Prior to going under the Mathis Entertainment production company, Kickass News was substantially less successful and fluctuated widely within the charts.
- Since launching under the Mathis Entertainment production company, Kickass News has had a remarkable and consistent track record appearing within the top 10 of Apple Podcasts charts.
- Kickass News is consistently ranked between fourth and sixth on the Apple Podcast charts.
- Kickass News hasn’t had an episode in the top 200 in Apple between February 1 and February 15th, yet never fell outside the top 10 podcasts.
The Implications of Gaming the Charts
Like I said above, many will view this as a victim-less innovative growth tactic. And to that, I agree. Unless a podcast is using their position in the charts to defraud advertisers by selling at a higher rate than they deserve, this is really an ethical (and genius) tactic. In essence, they’re gaining extra exposure and awareness to attract new listeners.
As podcast analytics mature and advertisers further familiarize themselves with the medium, vanity stats like charts or subscribers will matter less than engaged listeners. Growth tactics like the ones detailed above will only be successful if they’re able to use their standing to convert actual engaged listeners.
We’ve long discussed how the podcast discovery mechanism is broken, and therefore a lot of interested podcasters browse the top charts looking for something new. Similar to having a large Twitter following, prospective listeners will check out whatever is popular. Surely, if others are listening (or following on Twitter) it must be good, right?
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3 Comments
Great investigative work, Kevin. Now to see if Apple (finally) can do (or cares to do) anything about it. Not that fixing an easily-gamed system with algorithms is easy. (See: Archie, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo!, et. al.) Google could do it, but they’ve bungled every other entry into podcasting thus far. So I guess it’s up to Apple, as they’ve the lion’s share of the game for the foreseeable future.
Awesome, job in detecting the activity. It may be legal and even genius. However, when the fake growth is used eventually used to obtain financial benefits such as a sponsorship based on the fake numbers the it is beyond an ethical and moral dilemma it becomes a sharp practice of deception that may hurt the entire podcast industry.
Agree. I think (and that’s the keyword here), most advertisers are familiar enough with podcasts to ask for listener data before making an investment. The top charts are nice, but if I were writing a check I’d want to know how many people I’m reaching too.
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