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Click Farms Are Gaming Apple's Top Podcasts List (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the gaming-the-system dept.

A new report sheds some light on the issue of paid click farms gaming Apple's long-running list of Top Podcasts. From a report: Earlier this month, Apple's long-running list of Top Podcasts began to exhibit some unusual issues -- no-name podcasts vaulting over popular, well-established ones -- but the company appeared to quickly fix its chart. Unfortunately, the problems have popped up again, and an analysis from podcast industry tracker Chartable suggests that paid click farms are now gaming the list, which it calls "the closest thing to the Billboard Top 100 in the podcast world." In theory, Apple's podcast popularity rankings might not matter -- podcasts are free, and Apple's only one source of such rankings. But after introducing its Podcast Directory in 2005, Apple became the world's largest aggregator of such programming, and its rankings serve two purposes: showing listeners what's hot, and helping advertisers determine which shows to support, thereby keeping their creators afloat. The core problem is that Apple's Top Podcasts chart appears to use a poor and easily manipulated ranking metric. Chartable believes that it's based entirely upon a podcast's total number of new subscribers over the past week, with weights assigned to movement in the past one to three days.

14 comments

  1. Yeah but what about Quantum Computing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pay no attention to the massive drop in IBM share price, Quantum Computing is right around the corner everybody!

  2. Re:uhh, what about ISIS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lies. Cite sources.

    CAPTCHA: bogeymen

  3. And... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And nothing of value was lost.

  4. Incorporating "reputation" by TheDarkener · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I really like StackExchange's "reputation" system for users. From what I understand it relates in many ways to Slashdot's karma system. These things have been around for a while and seems to handle issues like this very well. Why aren't user reputation/karma systems a much more popular method, in general, for voting/ranking/etc?

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    1. Re:Incorporating "reputation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Too easily cheated. Get a few email accounts to create self supporting sockpuppets to upmod your main account and it's abused for downmod bombing opponents too. It's crap and it happens here.

    2. Re:Incorporating "reputation" by TheDarkener · · Score: 1

      I would think that you could build in checks for that kind of thing. IANAP but seems it would be something that you would have to constantly update to keep up with people trying to game the system.

      --
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    3. Re:Incorporating "reputation" by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      There are checks you can do but they get expensive in a hurry. Doing these sorts of checks at a domain level was actually part of my research in grad school, but it was several orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to go from “how many domains link to X” to “how many domains link to the domains that link to X”, which was significantly more difficult for the spammers to abuse.

      Back then, we’d see them register 10,000 domains just to prop up 1, then get a refund on 9,999 of them within the one-week window when they could get a full refund, meaning that they were only out the cost of one domain. The eventual fix for that particular proble:was to add a non-refundable portion to each registration fee. Those $0.05 fees wouldn’t matter to legitimate people, but unscrupulous sorts quickly found their tactics too expensive to use, at least for awhile.

      Anyway, podcasts are a lot harder to do since the only registration is an account creation, which costs nothing. Aside from adding weight to long-time accounts, I’m not sure what you could do, and that’s just delay the problem.

    4. Re:Incorporating "reputation" by TheDarkener · · Score: 1

      I can see how, like you said, at the domain level it would be difficult to tackle. I think what I'm referring to is a bit different though. AFAIK, at least with SE reputation, you sort of have to 'prove yourself' as an account holder before you get any real weight to downvote or have say in parts of the system. This would be through a series of actions or achievements on your account, some trivial to complete, some a bit more involved. I think the threshold to completing those achievements is a bit much for a simple spam/bombing account that can't necessarily be (easily) scripted. In other words you'd have to put forth some real effort on these accounts to be able to use them later for insincere purposes. Of course, with AI getting more sophisticated daily, I can imagine a 'war' of sorts between the guardians of sincerity and the other side. Hmmm.

      --
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  5. But that's because the games make you click by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 1

    "Stay on target"

    "Stay on target"

    "There's a Spam fighter coming in at twelve o'clock high!"

    "NOOOOO!!!!"

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    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  6. TIL by bobmagicii · · Score: 1

    TIL that podcasts are even still a thing. that's my quota, learn one new thing a day! i'm out of here happy friday beeches.

  7. Fine with me by TheCastro1689 · · Score: 1

    The same boring podcasts at the top of the list need some rotating anyway. It's like CBS or something, people just listen to them because they are there.

  8. Re:uhh, what about ISIS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why do they even call it a podcast? I was listening to audiocasts long before the iPod even existed.

    Fucking Apple and their shills always trying to rewrite history and distort facts.