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There Are No Shortcuts

There Are No Shortcuts

Christy Pritchard & Matt Cundill
April 10, 2024

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One podcast story that caught my eye a few weeks ago involved podcasts that were purchases “follows” inside gaming apps. I’ll be brief on the technical side of it all but basically people who are playing video games on phones can “Listen Now” to an episode of a podcast.

You can read the full piece here.

Here's the deal. There are no shortcuts when you are building audiences. You can make your numbers look better, you can inflate chart positions, you can even speak to someone from Bangledesh who promises you big success on iTunes. (Even though Apple moved their podcasts from iTunes to Apple Podcasts in 2018, it doesn’t appear word has reached Bangledesh as of yet) But let me ask you... what do you plan to do with those inflated numbers? Boast about your podcast being Top 10 in the Basket-weaving category of Apple? Who are you boasting to? Are you going to put those numbers into a proposal and send them to a potential advertiser? Are you going to go to another podcaster and do a promo-swap and promise them 100,000 downloads when you know your audience is less?

If you do any of those things, you rank somewhere between a thief and a fraud. While many of the methods to gain those extra downloads and rankings might be compliant with podcast measuring methods, you are essentially being deceitful. But let’s wind ahead a bit. What happens after 6 months when your promo swap partner has not seen an uptick in downloads and your clients cash register didn’t ring?

The promo swap partner will know the truth and the client who bought ads will think (erroneously) that podcast advertising doesn’t work. We used to see this nonsense in the music industry when record companies would “paper the room” by getting radio stations to give out massive amounts of free tickets in hopes that the venue would appear full and the band is more popular than it is. Anytime that happened, we knew the group would not be around in a year. No video, promotional radio airplay was going to save the sinking ship. Unless your marketing is going to involve real people interested in becoming a podcast listener to your show... one who will engage and listen to the end... you are wasting everyone’s time (including your own) in some form of three card monte.

Dan Misner from Bumper wrote an excellent piece about this subject matter, and it is worth a read if you want to hear more about this.

STOP DOING THIS!

Stop thinking your podcast doesn’t need a website. It does. For the record we use Podpage for our network and Wix for our Sound Off Podcast – those are good places to start.