A few weeks ago, we echoed a news story stating that the rankings of the most listened to podcasts through the Apple platform they showed an abnormal order, finding first podcast about real estate agencies, business and fitness in general, while one of the most listened to podcasts in the United States, Serial, had dropped considerably in the ranking.
But Serial was not the only one affected, since various media were also affected by the abnormal order of the classification. It was then that they claimed there was some kind of manipulation, manipulation that could come from click farms that for as little as $ 50, claim to place podcasts among the top 20 most listened to.
A new analysis carried out confirms that this is the case and that unfortunately it is happening again despite the fact that Apple had assured to take action on the matter to prevent this type of manipulation from happening again in the rankings of the most listened to podcasts. The Charable medium began to analyze this situation starting with the Bulletproof Real Estate podcast, a podcast that reached the first position of the most listened to podcasts earlier this month.
Despite that Apple does not provide details of how its rankings are calculated, the main factor is likely to be the number of subscriptions. Since that data is not publicly available, Chartable looked at other information than is available: recommendations to other podcasts. As we can read in the report made by Chartable:
The recommendations are quite simple: People who subscribe to Series also subscribe to similar podcasts, something that does not attract particularly attention.
If we take a look at the same recommendations for the listeners of Bulletproof Real Este, we see how the top 3 recommendations are all from Warrior Empire, a podcast network that has also shown unusual movements in recent weeks in the rankings.
The programs are recommended to each other, in addition to the same 5 podcast as always. It seems highly unlikely that the same listeners are listening to all of these shows and putting them all at the top of the podcast charts.
Chartable has created a map in which we can see how all podcasts are related through this recommendation system. As we can see, some are recommended to others. Given the disparity in content, it is clear that this is not normal. A subsequent analysis confirmed that none of these recommend the most popular podcasts.