Australian Podcast Ranker ‘doesn’t capture the full story’: Spotify
Spotify ANZ's head of podcasts Prithi Dey
Australian podcasters who have added video to their offering are increasingly “torn” over whether to leave the audio-only Australian Podcast Ranker, a Spotify executive has told Mumbrella.
Spotify ANZ head of podcast Prithi Dey warned that the Commercial Radio Australia-run Australian Podcast Ranker no longer provides “a full picture of the market” because it fails to measure video-format podcasts, tracking only audio downloads rather than streams.
Dey pointed to podcast Shameless leaving the Ranker as an illustration of its shortcomings, with the creators noting on social media that their exit followed the chart’s failure to capture video streams once they began posting full-length video episodes on Spotify.
“It’s really important to have a third-party measurement platform that provides greater transparency and clarity in the ecosystem,” said the representative from Spotify, the service who refuses to offer their data to the third-party measurement platform attempting to provide media planners with a source of truth.
Does this not strike anyone else as odd? Clearly this isn’t about transparency for measurement because Spotify isn’t offering to contribute to the industry standard for measurement.
If you’re placing video ads within a vodcast stream, don’t expect that audio-video asset to actually have been seen by many people and have a lasting impact, because anyone “watching” the vodcast actually just had it running in the background while they were doing something else. The only time people are giving their visual attention to a vodcast is when a short-form clip shows up in their social feed.
Your comment “It’s really important to have a third-party measurement platform that provides greater transparency and clarity in the ecosystem,” said the representative from Spotify, the service who refuses to offer their data to the third-party measurement platform attempting to provide media planners with a source of truth.” Is 100% spot on. Spotify bang on saying that the ranker ‘doesn’t capture the full story’ but doesn’t share any numbers or provide transparency on their platform.
I would take the data from the ranker, over anything else.
When a podcaster turns on video or joins the Spotify creators program, Spotify does not share data and completely cuts off the export of audio/video logs data being shared to the Australian Podcast Ranker. As a podcaster and content creator this was one of the main and significant reasons why we decided not to do this when approached by Spotify to upload video as we see incredible value in being in the ranker and not being able to share this data was just acceptable. I bet Shameless would’ve 100% stayed in the ranker if Spotify allowed the sharing of the log data.
Mumbrella should ask Spotify to clarify and correct the real reason why a podcaster like me can’t upload video to Spotify and also be in the ranker.