What are the Things You Need to Know To Easily Get to the Apple Top Podcast Charts Ranking?

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Hey everyone, this is Tom and Tracy on Feed you'd brand and today we've got a very current topic to talk about regarding itunes and or Apple. Really it's all Apple at the end of the day, their top podcast charts on itunes.

Yeah, so a lot of people think that the top podcast, I mean it's top podcast charts are hackable. Like I don't know how else to explain it, but everybody, they're manipulatable. So there's been a lot of people, I don't know if you've been getting it on LinkedIn, but I get them all the time of people saying I can promise you top position in the top charts on I on Apple.

Oh my gosh, I get it all the time. I not only get it, I not only I get it through LinkedIn, I get it through Facebook, people soliciting me and I get it direct email. Whether it's on LinkedIn, it's usually somebody from India or some other foreign country where labor is low and they guarantee you you can hire them and they' get you top of the charts in the email. 1. I've actually gotten it from a US company that is actually, I'm not going to out the company because I'm not necessarily trying to trash anybody. But I think what they're doing is, how do I say, it may be legitimate, but they're charging a lot of money and I'm talking thousands and thousands of dollars a month to do a marketing campaign, PR blitz, all sorts of things to get the word out about your podcast and drive more listeners to which is ultimately what is going to get you ranking higher in the charts on Apple.

Okay, but let's be really clear here. No one believes that the top charts, the Apple top podcast chart is related to listeners. They believe that it's related to subscribers actually.

And I disagree with that.

I'm just telling you that's what they believe and that's what these, all these, whether they're bot farms or fiverr people clicking for you fake subscriber accounts that are being set up that are then subscribing to you, they believe that it's based on subscribers and not listeners in the long run, we don't see that on our end.

Well, actually, subscribers and listeners would be the same thing. You meant subscribers and listens or plays, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I actually, I mean, I think I may have mentioned this in a past episode. It bears a little repeating if I did, because this is more focused on this subject. But I just from our experience and because we follow the top charts, we have a lot of podcasters who are on the top charts and have been there for years and continue to be. We had. I think I talked about passive real estate investing with Marco Santarelli in a recent episode and a cautionary tale about why his podcast was delisted from itunes started, really because of his cover art that was out of spec with their new standards. But so he's been at the top of business investing within the top 10 for at least more than a year, if not two years. It's been quite a long time. And after his podcast got realistic, he got right back up there. Well, so there's been some recent announcements about how Apple has sort of reset or recalibrated their top charts from. I guess I don't know if it's from an algorithmic standpoint, it may be, or just. I don't know how else they would reset it. But there are so many companies that are claiming they can get you in there, that there are those out there in the podcast world that think that Apple's charts are hackable. Now, I don't think they're hackable in the literal sense, that some hacker is going into itunes system and manipulating rankings to push someone out.

It's an algorithmic hack.

It's meaning it's a. It's almost like a. I would think of it more as a life hack, although the. It's a process hack, maybe saying that, well, if you do this and if you do this, that's what Apple's chart algorithm is looking for, and your podcast will get higher.

I'm sure that there's been a lot of intended manipulation going on. I mean, I think these companies that are soliciting you to pay lots of money, I don't think they're not doing anything to get you on the charts. I think they are doing things to get you on the charts. The question is, are they doing something that is bringing real listeners to your.

Show, valuable listeners who are going to listen to your episodes, take action, become.

Subscribers, become a part of your community.

Exactly.

And I think that that's questionable. At minimum, Certainly it's debatable as to whether they are any of these services are bringing legitimate customers or are they using click farms in Asia and paying people to subscribe and they end up downloading all your episodes and never listening to them. I think if you have a huge number of listeners in other countries, maybe you do really have listeners in that country. I know in one of our first podcasts, we had a large listening audience in Brazil, of all places, in our 3D printing podcast. And I know that was legitimate because they communicated with us. Right.

People were really there.

Yeah, they emailed in questions and they went to meetups. I mean, we learned a lot about these listeners in those other countries. If you have a spike of downloads from another country, especially, you know, India or, you know, Singapore or the Philippines or whatever, I think maybe you have reason to question if those listeners are legitimate. But we're not here to provide you any proof of that or trying to peel back the curtain on something specific. All we're saying is we also have experience with many podcasters who we know are not doing anything to manipulate the top charts. And yet they are on the top charts. And they may fluctuate from number two to number five to number eight and back and forth, but the ones that are putting out consistent episodes and quality content are getting legitimate listeners. And the reason I don't buy this, Tracy, about it's the subscribers. You have to get so many prescribers in the recent weeks in order to enter on the charts. I disagree with that and number of.

Reviews because also many, many of our podcasters do not have tons of reviews.

Well, and some do. Some have hundreds and some don't have a lot. I've seen actually some very recent podcasts that don't have a ton of reviews end up in the tops of the charts.

Exactly. So the reviews, we're always really skeptical about those that say, oh, it's a combination of this, this and this. Because we have some podcast in our system that deviates from that algorithm, from.

Those, I guess, theories. Right. And I agree with you, Tracy. I mean, I do think it is likely that how many five star ratings you have as a percentage of your total ratings, or maybe how many reviews you have of your show do play a role in the algorithm. I think it'd be silly if they didn't play a role. But by and large, what we see show after show by looking at the data of downloads is that downloads is still the most specific thing that downloads and full listen. But it's also, here's the thing there are podcasts that are at the top charts we see consistently that have consistent number of downloads, episode after episode, month after month. Okay. Even after this reset that's been mentioned. And I'm going to have a link to the article that really spurred this conversation Tracy and I are having today about Apple and what has maybe reset their top podcast charts to kind of clean up any potential manipulation. At least that's the theory put forward by this rather short article that again I will link to in the blog post at FeedYourBrand co. So you can go check that out. But here's what we know. All right. And this is from just long hard evidence and working with many people that are in the top charts is that I don't believe people that, that are touting. And I've heard people say it at speaking events, I've heard it from other people who are customers that were at other speaking events where somebody from another podcast hosting company is saying, here's what it takes to get in the top charts. Here's what Apple is looking for. And it definitely is heavy on the if you're not getting new subscribers on a weekly basis, you're not going to be at the top of the charts. And I don't believe it. Reason is we have many podcasters who are on the top charts whose episode downloads from one episode to the next are consistently, let's say one particular Customer is getting 10 to 15,000 downloads of each episode within the first two weeks of that episode going out there. And in the first week it's closer to 10,000 and it usually gets about 5,000 over the course of the next week. And that's pretty consistent. If they were getting new subscribers every week, we would see those download numbers consistently going up week after week.

That's what happened with our show early on. That's what we saw was we had like a 40% month over month growth in overall podcast listens. So we knew our subscriber base was.

Growing, was increasing, was increasing.

By that, we sort of leveled off at about 100,000amonth. And so even when we fluctuated in the number of episodes though, we leveled off at that. And so we realized that our subscriber base had leveled off at that stage for us.

Sure.

And that's what it started to show for us. So we've seen that happen with shows and it is not changed their ranking.

I agree. And this is not just our own shows. I mean, Tracy did give a good example from one of our shows. Okay. And that's legitimate we have those historical downloads and we see that, but we're seeing it with many other podcasters and we know they're not paying anything, they're not paying anyone to hack, to get up on the charts. Again, I think there is no substitute for creating great content on a regular basis, being consistent with that and multicasting it, putting it everywhere, putting it out as a blog, putting it out maybe as a video on YouTube, spreading the word on social media, participating in all sorts of different groups in your niche to get the word out there. I mean, there's absolutely something to be said for real marketing, organic or paid, if you want to get the word out about your show and to gain more listeners. Nothing wrong with that. And that's legitimate. I think that there are maybe some companies that are really marketing companies wanting you to pay them to market your podcast to get more listeners. And you can do that if you want to. And I know there are some companies that do pay to do that. But again, it's not hacking a system, it's not hiring a company with click farms to get fake downloads. It's legitimate, spreading the word, spreading awareness, making sure more listeners know about your show. Because if you do that, there are more people that are probably going to want to listen, that will continue to subscribe over time. But I tell you that I think everyone that we're involved with that's on the top charts has not paid any money for marketing of any kind.

In this particular case, this Apple Insider article that spurred this discussion for us, they're stating that there was this like reset where all the shows got all jumbled around and shows that had no business being in the top ranking got in the top ranking and then about a week or so later it all got reset.

Right.

And I think its timing is suspect to what we saw happen with passive real estate investing that with Marco Santarelli's show, we saw this reset happen because many of those top shows were our older shows that had older cover art got delisted. It took us a while on his behalf to petition, send emails, get somebody, because there isn't a staff, a high level of staff anymore on the Apple.

Podcast side at itunes the way they used to be. Yeah, we do understand they've drastically reduced the number of full time employees on itunes because itunes in terms of podcasts is not something Apple really makes much money on, if any. I mean, they invented the podcast and the space, the ipod, all this that has created this wonderful industry we're all in. But it's not a big moneymaker for them. And they have, we understand, reduced a lot of staff.

Right. And that had an effect as to how it got reset. And so I think there might have been something where they delisted a bunch of shows. A lot of shows had these problems. They got them fixed and they got themselves reinstated to their position again. And it wasn't about somebody coming in and hacking the system and making and putting shows that didn't belong in the top to the top. I don't think that that's what happened. I think it's timing to what we saw with a few shows that had issues at that time were all are coincide with that timing as well. So I can't say that somebody found a hack in.

I just don't believe it. And I agree with that. And you know what, Tracy, I'll tell you on the screenshots that are shared on that Apple and Soda article, which again I'm going to link to in the blog post, Marco Santarelli's podcast, whatever date they screenshot it, screenshot itunes top listings in his category. They did it before the reset, supposedly. And Marco Santarelli shows there at number it looks like 13. And then in the screenshot they took right after the reset, his show isn't there. However, at the time of this recording, I went and looked and I think this recording as we're doing this, it's only about a week later, not even a week later from when this Epelin center article came out. So I went and checked on itunes just this morning and Marco Santarelli is in that category at number eight again, which is where he's been between number two to number eight or 10 or 15. He's been consistently in that space. And again, he's just providing good content and has loyal listeners who want to hear what he has to say. He's not getting new subscribers upon subscribers every week. He's pretty consistent in his downloads. Whatever reset they did to the algorithm. The point is we're seeing consistent results really with what we've seen in the last year or two. Now compare that to new and noteworthy on Apple and that is, I think quite honestly has been abandoned by Apple and itunes. And I just checked it again before this particular recording of this episode and we still have the same shows on new and noteworthy. One of them is customer of ours who's been there for two years and isn't even publishing any new episodes now. So it's neither new nor noteworthy in all reality. She has no idea why she's there. She never paid anything. So I think It New and Noteworthy. Certainly we know New and noteworthy is not what it was five years ago when we started podcasting, when every new podcast was on that chart and there was 1500 or 2000 podcasts listed there. If anybody is selling you on the notion that if you work with them, they can get you on New and Noteworthy, I caution you against believing that because personally, I do not believe it's even possible anymore, certainly at this point in time, and I think partly because of the Apple reduction of staff for itunes. But New and noteworthy was not just algorithmically driven. I think it was also an editorial choice.

It's like staff at Apple. It's like a seller list, or it was always a staff choice. It was always. Somebody was blocking. They were keeping the list. And in their editorial idea of what.

It should be, or at least they were able to make the list what they felt it should be having. Maybe very little, if anything to do with how popular the show was. New and Noteworthy. Right. Anyway, that I definitely would not put any faith in. And if your goal in starting up your podcast is to get on New and Noteworthy, I would suggest you get a new goal, because that one is not going to be achievable.

Well, it's not even about it not being achievable. It's not useful.

I don't think it's very helpful. Yeah, I agree.

So there are a lot better ways for you to use your money if you want to put money into your show. Use your money to drive traffic to your website, use your money to drive your email list, Use your money to drive your subscribers that way so that they belong to you. Remember, doing this podcast should be an authority builder. That's what feed your brand is all about. That's what we're trying to empower you with. Here is all the tools you need to empower your brand and make it an authority in the marketplace and in your niche and area. And this top chart is one tiny little aspect of what authority is built around. And it is not the first thing I would put my money in.

And I think as time goes on and Google podcasts gains market share, among other things, I think the itunes charts become less and less relevant or less of a cachet if you get on there. I mean, I think we're going to see itunes market share of podcast listeners decreasing, or that may happen, but it also may be market share of listeners on other platforms increasing as new listeners come in. I mean, most new people that I talk to want to listen on Spotify. That's like their favorite thing.

Right. And I also do think that we are working into a world of more relevant content being served up to us. So all of Google podcasts especially is serving up things that are more relevant. If you like this show then you'll like this. And it is not about what's on a top list. That's not how true binge listeners, true subscribers. That's not how they subscribe to podcasts.

I agree.

So if you want the real valuable listeners, they're not going to subscribe based on you happen to hit this top list.

No, it's probably more outreach through social media or people sharing about this one. They listen to all sorts of other real organic things. But anyway, so that's that little update based on an article we read. Again, you can find the blog post@feedyourbrand co for this episode you can reach us anywhere on social media. Edyourbrand so thanks so much for listening everybody.

This has been Tracy and Tom on.

The feed you'd brand podcast.

It.