Podcasters Are Buying Millions Of Listeners, Raising Questions About Marketing Tactics
From billboards to carts to airplane banners, podcasters are always looking for enticing new places to promote their shows. However, some networks have found a less glamorous but highly effective way to attract millions of eligible listeners: load mobile games with certain types of ads.
When players click one of the in-game pop-up ads and earn virtual loot for doing so, the podcast episode is downloaded to their device. Podcast companies, in turn, can attract gamers as new listeners for their shows and add other desirable downloads to their extensive list.
This practice allows the network to quickly gather downloads by accessing resources for hyperactive video game users. But it also raises questions about who the legitimate podcast listeners are and how long it takes to download.
"Not all impressions are created equal," says Larry Chiagoris, a marketing professor at Pace University. "I'm not saying [this tactic] is unethical or illegal, but it does raise questions. If someone is trying to play a game and that's the purpose of the interaction, they might just be interested in playing the game and not particularly interested in the shared game." .."
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Podcasts typically rely on downloads as the primary metric for ad sales. When someone clicks the in-app play button on their mobile device, it will start downloading the entire episode so they can listen to it even when they don't have a good internet connection, like on a plane or on the subway. Ads for an episode are inserted at this point in the download, meaning that even if consumers only hear 10 minutes of a 30-minute show, ads are often ready to be heard up to 15 minutes into playback. Not to mention calculated by the trading team.
So far, the podcast industry has said almost nothing about adopting this video game strategy. In August, ad fraud detection company DeepSee published a research paper explaining how the practice caught the attention of players.
"No one really asked about it or what the user experience was," said DeepSee co-founder and CEO Rocky Moss.
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One of the games referenced in the DeepSee article is Subway Surfers, a popular mobile app from Denmark's Sybo that has been downloaded nearly 3 billion times since its debut in 2012. For two weeks in August, Bloomberg discovered that several publishers were using Game to collect podcast downloads, including the New York Post, independent podcaster Scott Savlove and iHeartMedia Inc.
Postal officials and iHeart declined to comment.
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Savlov said he spent the "token" money on in-game ads and used it to generate interest in the software when it first launched. He says that lately he's been turning more to social platform algorithms to promote his celebrity interviews.
"Don't just rely on [in-game ads] because at some point you want as much real, organic growth as possible," he said.
Podcast networks that actively use downloads in the mobile gaming space do so through an intermediary company called Jun Group, which was founded in 2005 and sold to Advantage Solutions Inc. , a marketing and sales firm, in 2018. Jun Group CEO Corey Weiner said the company specializes in increasing consumer awareness of its products, websites and podcasts by placing its ads on more than 1,000 mobile apps that reach 100 million people. unique user. . .
"There's a very important reason why all the big brands in the world invest so much in brand awareness, because without them you have no chance of cleaning up the mess," he said. "Every publisher, every content creator has invested in marketing to promote themselves from the start, and this is another way to do that."
The company doesn't track exactly how long players stay on a podcast after clicking on an ad, he said.
"I think the standards bodies that define what a game podcast is can decide to raise the bar for what constitutes a game podcast," Weiner said. "Even if you raise the bar, [the ad] is still going to be substandard. So I actually suggest raising the bar because we can jump over it."
The price podcasts companies pay for these ads can vary depending on whether they target a specific demographic or are guaranteed to attract a unique listener, according to someone who spoke to Jun Group. The starting price for a 20-second ad is $27 per 1,000 page views on the site. To monetize those downloads, podcasts can be flipped and ultimately sell the audience to brand advertisers, perhaps for a nice premium on top of what they pay Jun Group.
Jun Group's main podcast clients are iHeart, which has produced programs by Will Ferrell, Charlemagne Tha Judd and Shonda Rhimes. The radio company, which bills itself as the world's largest podcast publisher, has spent more than $10 million since 2018 and initially garnered about 6 million unique listeners a month with those ads from its in-game campaigns, according to a person familiar with the effort. and the end of the month. The effect can be seen in a publicly available chart created by Chartable, a podcast marketing company owned by Spotify Technology SA.
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In the last week of August, the iHeart podcast collected more than half of the top 10 most popular shows, although one podcast on the list hadn't released a new episode in months, and the last one hadn't aired a new show in over a year. . A number of specials that Bloomberg encountered on Subway Surfers also charted at the bottom of the charts, including Life in Spaglish, Run That Prank and All the Smoke.
(Disclosure: iHeart is a Bloomberg Media partner and saw an ad for the Bloomberg podcast that aired on DeepSee Subway Surfers.)
iHeart also ranks first in Podtrac, a monthly podcast ranking that measures a network's unique audience and downloads. In August, it reached nearly 35.5 million unique listeners, 11 million more than its closest competitor, Wondery of Amazon.com Inc. The company topped the list for the first time in August 2020 with 24.6 million unique listeners, compared to 24 million from National Public Radio.
The incentive to invest in marketing channels like the Jun Group channel is clear. The audio industry is characterized by an investment frenzy. In order to recoup cash as quickly as possible, some companies will rely on increasing the reach of their podcasts to generate more advertising revenue. Industry revenues are expected to exceed $4 billion by 2024, from approximately $700 million in 2019.
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