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Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 221, dated August 6, 2019. (By the way, we’re taking next week off. Happy summer, everyone.)
The Apple podcast categories are back in business. After a brief vacation, the categories, thought to be an important discovery and consumption management tool, have rolled back out, complete with the new genres and subgenres announced at the beginning of June.
It will probably take a little while longer for the new categories to get fully up to speed and for some wrinkles to get ironed out. (For example, at this writing, a tab called “All-Time Bestsellers” can be found when you click through the New Show options.) But for now, it’s pretty satisfying to pore through the new Fiction and True Crime pages, which presents the formalization of key podcast segments that have been a long time coming.
Every time Podtrac, the long-running service that verifies podcast analytics for publishers, pops up in this newsletter, I make it a point to link to my older columns on the service that points out the caveats, like so: here, here, and here.
That’s because Podtrac’s industry rankers continue to be structurally incomplete representations of the overall podcast industry; that was true when I wrote those columns in 2016, and it remains true today. As a reminder, those rankers only pull in hard data for publishers that participate in Podtrac’s measurement system — a requirement that not every publisher is comfortable with, which is why we don’t see complete participation — while the show rankers purport to equally display shows from publishers that participate in their service and shows from publishers that don’t (with the download counts for non-paying publishers said to be “determined by a proprietary Podtrac algorithm which uses publicly available data,” though the reliability of that claim is anybody’s guess).
However, despite their incomplete nature, Podtrac’s rankers remain the only easily accessible industry rankers out in the public, which is why they become a natural point of reference for reporters looking to quickly grasp a narrative around the podcast industry — and in doing so, likely under-weighing the implications of the necessary caveats. And so we continue to have situations like this Fast Company writeup, which does...