Click Farms Are Gaming Apple's Top Podcasts List (venturebeat.com) 14
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.
Incorporating "reputation" (Score:4, 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?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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,
Re: (Score:2)
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
But that's because the games make you click (Score:2)
"Stay on target"
"Stay on target"
"There's a Spam fighter coming in at twelve o'clock high!"
"NOOOOO!!!!"
TIL (Score:1)
Fine with me (Score:2)
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.