This issue isn't any one person's/organisation's fault, and especially not Apple's fault. Podcasting is one of those technologies that was kind of born by accident and evolved organically. It wasn't invisioned and developed by some consortium or startup company.
Podcasts are essentially nothing more than an MP3 (or ACC, or whatever other audio file format) sitting on a file server somewhere with a simple RSS feed pointing to them - that's submitted to all the different podcast indexing sites/apps. There's no one single central podcast service that manages the hosting of all these audio files and RSS feeds which means the only way to track listeners is to track the hits to the servers hosting the file. This obviously doesn't provide a thoroughly accurate statistic. Unless every single consumer (podcast indexing sites and apps) came together to develop a stadard they all had to adhere to, there's not really any better options.
Maybe these podcast rating agencies need to do a whole lot more R&D to adopt a more algorithmic approach to tracking listeners like the old days of broadcast television viewer ratings.
Podcasts are essentially nothing more than an MP3 (or ACC, or whatever other audio file format) sitting on a file server somewhere with a simple RSS feed pointing to them - that's submitted to all the different podcast indexing sites/apps. There's no one single central podcast service that manages the hosting of all these audio files and RSS feeds which means the only way to track listeners is to track the hits to the servers hosting the file. This obviously doesn't provide a thoroughly accurate statistic. Unless every single consumer (podcast indexing sites and apps) came together to develop a stadard they all had to adhere to, there's not really any better options.
Maybe these podcast rating agencies need to do a whole lot more R&D to adopt a more algorithmic approach to tracking listeners like the old days of broadcast television viewer ratings.
