Podcasters Buying Fake Downloads Through Gaming Apps?

Rewarded traffic is a marketing tactic that works through online gaming apps. Players win reward points purely for consuming ads in the middle of a game. Click the ad and you’ll be redirected to a promotional web page and earn tokens in exchange for your attention. Close the ad and you’ll miss out on those points. So essentially, brands are ‘paying’ gamers to view their ads.

When a player clicks the ad, this auto-downloads a podcast episode to their device and they earn reward points if they listen for longer than 20 seconds. But because they also download more than one minute of the episode, each click counts towards the publisher’s listening stats too.

So the podcast publisher grows their listening stats through these clicks even though, realistically, the chances of the player ever actually listening to the podcast episode is slim-to-none. Naturally, they’re just in it for the points.

Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman did some digging into the game Subway Surfers – the most-downloaded mobile game of the last decade. She found that a number of reputable publishers, including the New York Post and iHeartMedia, were using this game to increase their download numbers.

If podcasts continue to inflate their numbers and sell ads based on those numbers, sponsors will eventually stop working with them when they realize they’re not getting a good return on their spend. When they see their campaign isn’t working because the audience they’ve been promised isn’t actually there, these sponsors might pull out of podcast advertising altogether, believing the medium doesn’t work.

And if they’ve run ads on a top show and it flopped, why would they even bother working with smaller niche shows? In the long term, dodgy marketing tactics like this could impact us all.

Bottom line: some of the top podcast providers are inflating their numbers, which is shortchanging their advertisers.

This is a real threat to the burgeoning podcast industry.

1 posted on 10/04/2022 4:47:35 PM PDT by Brookhaven

, dodgy marketing tactics like this could impact us all.

Dodgy marketing practices should fail. Period.

2 posted on 10/04/2022 4:54:21 PM PDT by drSteve78 (Je suis Deplorable STILL)

Now aren’t we all glad there are no advertisements here at FR and that we as customers pay for the service?

3 posted on 10/04/2022 4:59:18 PM PDT by PeterPrinciple (Thinking Caps are no longer being issued but there must be a warehouse full of them somewhere.)

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