Podtrac Removes iHeartMedia Podcasts From Latest Rankings

Podnews Tuesday reported on highly inflated figures from iHeartMedia on Podtrac's charts. Nine hours later, Podtrac silently removed iHeartMedia from all of their ratings charts. The company notes on their revised release: "Preloading podcast content is prohibited under IAB podcast measurement guidelines."

Six hours after they removed the figures, Podtrac emailed a statement to Podnews: "Thank you for your well researched blog post of earlier today, and for the time and attention you’ve given our Podtrac rankings. We wanted to let you know that we have a variety of processes to proactively look for anomalous download behavior, but in this case, we missed iHeart’s preload behavior via its affiliate websites. We have restated our October and November 2017 rankings on our website, and we have added more checks to our processes to prevent this in the future. We have also added documentation to reiterate the IAB’s guidelines prohibiting preloading of podcast content via website players."

The revised Podtrac analytics show The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe as the US's most popular short-form podcast.