If your podcast coach/consultant/producer/manager comes to you and says, “Congrats you're in the top 1% of all podcasts in Listen notes, don't uncork the champagne yet. This video explains why:
But Listen Notes Remove The Dead Shows (?)
What Is the Listen Score?
Listen Score (LS) is a metric that shows the estimated popularity of a podcast compared to all other RSS-based public podcasts in the world on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher, the more popular. It's like Nielsen ratings for podcasts. On 6/13/23 they stated, “Global Rank is the ranking of 3,123,667 podcasts based on Listen Score.”
What is Global Rank?
This podcast is one of the top 0.5% most popular shows out of 3,123,667 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score (the estimated popularity score).
They state, “We deploy automatic scripts (24/7) and human moderators (daily) to clean up data. We try our best to minimize the number of such bad “podcasts” in our database.” So they clean up shows that aren't really podcasts. But per the listen notes stats, Anchor has 1,719,401 for 56%, and so many of the podcasts on Anchor (Now Spotify for podcasters) are people testing the show with maybe one or two episodes. Because Anchor is free, those episodes can live forever.
So you're more popular than the THOUSANDS of shows that are primarily “Test, Test…”
You are also more popular than shows that no longer actively promote their show. See video
Is This a Bad Podcast Coach or a Bad Person?
I understand that everyone loves a pat on the back, but the information is right there on the site. Yes, you are compared to millions of other podcasts. Your podcast consultant should know that often, more than 75% of podcasts have not put out an episode in 90 days. See the graph to the left from Podcast Industry Insights.
If they don't know this, then maybe they aren't as up-to-date on podcasting as they should be.
The other alternative is even more disturbing. If your podcast consultant knows the listen notes stat is somewhat of a bogus stat, and they use it anyway because the new podcasters don't know any better. Then that makes them a “not so good” person, in my opinion.
When they tell you that you are in the top 10%, it helps justify the money you are paying them.
