Ranker rancour
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today: What’s the real story behind the decision to drop sales house rankings from the Australian Podcast Ranker?
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Ranker shenanigans
The new Australian Podcast Ranker dropped yesterday.
A couple of the most interesting data points have gone missing. The rankings of top publishers and top sales houses have, without much of an explanation, been “retired”.
Normally when a metric is nuked, there’s a reason involving a decline in the medium being measured. Like Donald Trump’s attitude to bad economic data, a short term answer can be to simply remove the source of the bad news.
When the three big magazine publishers Bauer Media, Pacific Magazines and NewsLifeMedia knifed the Audit Bureau of Circulation by simultaneously resigning in December 2016, it followed years of poor headlines around negative circulation numbers. Instead magazines dropped off the advertising agenda.
When readership metric Emma was killed off in 2021, it was because the newspaper industry failed in its attempt to kill off Roy Morgan Research as the main source of readership data. Instead, the scepticism about readership numbers - particularly when combined with digital reach - got worse.
When OzTam axed much of the data on average audience numbers at the start of last year, it was because its three owners Seven, Nine and Ten wanted to try to move the conversation to the total reach of a show. Now most trade press don’t bother to cover the overnights and the continuing power of TV is less talked about than ever.
The Australian Podcast Ranker, run by Triton and funded by local audio players brought together by industry body Commercial Radio + Audio, is already far from a full picture. Global audio house Acast, Sirius XM (which left a couple of months ago) and Spotify are among those that do not participate, and the Australian Podcast Ranker does not capture listening on YouTube, which is a fast growing channel for podcasts.
CRA’s explanation for removing the data doesn’t really explain why. CRA’s statement from CEO Lizzie Young was, in full:
“In July the industry relaunched the official Australian Podcast Ranker. This change was driven by the industry’s Podcasting Steering Committee - comprised of CRA members, independent publishers, ABC and SBS.
“The ambition being to make it more relevant for clients and agencies by ensuring they can access the data and insights that best help them plan and target podcast audiences across demographics, titles, and genres.”
It was one of those committee decisions to help make things “more relevant” by hiding data previously available. I’d love to know the dynamic in that committee meeting where somebody proposed removing the rankings, and persuaded the majority in the room to go along with it.
The fact that CRA did not disclose the decision at the time does not add to the case for this being a move made for positive reasons.
The top sales house, or top publisher was an interesting metric.
Even historic data has been removed, making it impossible to confirm past figures. But the race for top sales house was usually extremely close, with Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr usually just ahead of ARN Media’s iHeart for total listeners. I seem to recall that ARN was just ahead of SCA for total monthly downloads, but again the data is gone, so I can’t confirm that.
The usefulness of the data was that it was based on actual download numbers. When audiences are surveyed about their habits, they tend to over report. Hence the slightly dubious claims that most adults are weekly podcast listeners these days, despite the Podcast Ranker data not backing that up when it was available.
Another factor that suggests the decision to remove the data was made here in Australia is the fact that in all other markets where Triton offers a Podcast Ranker - the US, Canada, New Zealand, Latin America and the Netherlands - it offers a ranking of the top networks.
For some reason Australia’s local podcast players have decided not to follow the international norm. Australia is the only one of the six marketers where Triton operates its ranker where this data has been taken away.
So why may the local players have wanted that information removed?
Could it be (un)reliability? Disputes over technical definitions? Disagreement over whether monthly listeners or downloads should determine ranking position?
Or could it have been sector politics? I recall the ABC was breathing down the neck of Listnr and iHeart for top publisher. I seem to recall Listnr and iHeart had about 10m downloads per month each with the ABC a close third. Is that an embarrassingly low number for what should be a growth medium? Would it have been awkward for the commercial sector to be overtaken by its public sector rival? Now we won’t know if it happens.
I wonder if there was discomfort within the sector that the overall reach of podcasts seemed to be flatlining.
Somewhere in the Triton system, all of this data is still available. The fact that, unlike the other five Triton markets, the Australian audio industry does not want the world to see it says a lot.
SWM swings down and Enero moves up on the Unmade Index
Seven West Media saw the biggest movement on the Unmade Index yesterday, losing 3.6% on a mixed day of trading.
Meanwhile agency holdco Enero finally reversed its weeklong decline after six straight days of falls in its share price. It improved by 4.8%.
ARN Media wasn’t far behind Enero, improving by 3.2%. Rival Southern Cross Austereo improved by 0.6%
Resource sector B2B operation Aspermont finished flat after revealing that it had raised $2.6m under a capital raising exercise to shore up its balance sheet. The newly issued shares will start trading on Friday.
The Unmade Index closed down by 0.48% for the day, on 479.4 points.
More from Mumbrella…
The business of death: How funeral directors think about marketing
Opinion: Ten things I’ve learnt in the ten years since I started an agency
What makes an ad iconic? Vegemite and ‘Not Happy Jan’ top new list
Time to leave you to your day.
We’ll be back with an audio-led edition tonight in which my colleague Hal Crawford talks to former agency wunderkind Mat Baxter about his fascinating new skincare brand venture.
Have a great day
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
