Last week, Spotify announced that it would introduce public listen counts for all podcasts to “help attract new fans.” But podcasters were quick to criticize the new feature, mainly because it will further promote podcasts that already have a large audience, while smaller shows will become less attractive to new listeners.
On Friday, Spotify changed the course of its plans, but did not completely abandon the idea. From now on, the number of plays will only appear on shows that have received at least 50,000 plays each. Instead of showing the exact number of views, the designation will only be updated at certain milestones, such as 100,000 or 1 million views.
“We plan to launch this new version of the play count within the next week,” the company wrote in a blog post. “This update reflects our efforts to provide the best insight for creators and a clear experience for their fans.”
For decades, podcast hosting platforms have not shared many public indicators of a show’s popularity – Apple Podcasts, for example, has reviews and graphs on its app, but it would be difficult for a listener to know if a show has an audience of tens or tens of thousands of listeners.
Although Spotify considers this uncertainty to be a disadvantage, podcast creators are attracted to podcasting in part because it is refreshingly different from other forms of online media. For example, when someone clicks the “Play” button on a YouTube video, they are accessing the medium with pre-existing knowledge of how many views the video has and how many people subscribe to that channel. But podcasting can level the playing field for more niche creators.
Podcasters have also expressed frustration with the lack of a clear metric for what counts as a “play” or “stream” across platforms.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has been working with podcast platforms to establish a clear metric for what counts as a “play,” creating more consistency in deals between podcasters and advertisers. But, as Podnews reports, the definition of what counts as a “listen” on Spotify and YouTube, the two most popular podcast listening platforms, differs from the IAB standard.
Spotify said that the number of listens will depend on how many times “people have actively tried to listen” to the content, while streaming and downloading are only counted after 60 seconds of interaction.
