We’ve updated the Podtrac November 2019 Top 20 Podcasts ranking, removing two shows from American Media LLC. We learned today, from some heroic testing from James Cridland of Podnews, that an older version of a website player used by American Media downloads their podcasts without the user pressing play in the specific case of Android mobile users. Preloading content is not consistent with IAB V2 standards. We have removed these downloads from our data.
We looked at the incidence of this player version across all Podtrac measured podcasts, and other than this publisher, 0.1% of podcast downloads came from this same version of the player, and none of these came from the top 2,000 podcasts measured by Podtrac. Podtrac has added this version of the player to our blacklist and has notified the IAB Podcast Technical Working Group to do the same. Going forward downloads from this player will not be included in Podtrac counts.
Below is the revised Ranking.
