It's the truth. The podcasting fad has died not because there wasn't demand by consumers, but because advertisers weren't ready for new media. It's the reason why I stopped doing podcasts. Being more helpful for the advertiser than the advertiser is to you is not a good relationship.
Shawno
· 1 year ago
This is the first time I've seen anyone name names and cite numbers in terms of podcast sponsorship. Interesting stuff. I'm disappointed to see what you've said abour RawVoice, as I've always felt that they are the only company out there that's truly working on behalf of independent podcasters. I also have to admit that it's disheartening to see you bail on a show with the kind of audience numbers you claim to have. But, I guess everyone's into podcasting for their own reasons.
Jeffro2pt0
· 1 year ago
Ahhh, I've listened to you go on and on about this Mark on your podcast and I always thought about how screwed up the podcasting world must of been for you to be going through so much hell. It's a shame that these companies have no clue as to how to monetize the business. I am a very big fan of podcasts and I've never had to pay for any of them. Will podcasts turn into PAID FOR content? Also, is this trend of screwing the podcaster going to continue? How can these companies stay in business if they are constantly screwing the guys who are producing the content?
If you were to go to court with a lawyer and file a suit, do you think you'd have a chance to win?
Andrew Baron
· 1 year ago
I would suggest as just one option looking into a relationship with just one or two mid-to-long term sponsors who already understand the value of Mashable (and maybe that you already know) to help flip the bill to get you up and running.
Then, once you are up, you can take some more time to look for ad solutions as they mature.
Lots of different ways still yet uncovered to be forged.. . .
rizzn
· 1 year ago
@Jeffr0: probably not. That's another thing with podcast representation (in my experience) - the contracts are almost non-existent, and are structured in such a way that the rep can change or dictate the terms as they see fit. The only exception to that amongst the firms I've used is Podango, as they've been very kind to us in terms of things that were under their control.
@Andrew: We're currently exploring other options, at the moment. The final chapter hasn't been written on audio podcasting, or even audio podcasting at Mashable. Enough of it has been written, though, for us to make a commentary on a significant portion of the industry.
Angelo Mandato
· 1 year ago
Hey Mark,
I understand your frustration, podcast advertising is definitely not a simple download numbers equal payout formula. The numbers you quoted in this post are fairly high, I am certain that something else must have been a miss with the statistics of your download numbers. If you don't mind contacting me, I would like to verify that your statistics were correctly reported by RawVoice.
Thanks, Angelo
Todd Cochrane
· 1 year ago
Mark
You were to be paid for downloads from Aug 10th to Sept 30th on the referenced campaign. Your where required to utilize our stats engine. You used it in August but Sept data is nearly non existent.
You were to be paid on US and Canadian downloads for the shows in which the ads run in during this time frame. This was in the agreement you accepted.
Your US and Canadian Audience in August was 35.1% you only had a grand total of 7500 US downloads in August and 1682 total Canadian downloads in August.
Of those downloads only a portion of them were run with the advertising embedded.
Your show in August had 65% non payable downloads.
I do not appreciate the slander, non asking of clarification from us first, and breach of your confidentiality agreement etc.
I will be happy to go further into the details if you want me to.
You seem to have trouble with everyone you work with, could it be that your downloads are really not what you think they are.
@todd: It isn't slander, when it is true. We went round and round on the TechPodcast mailing list (as your archives will show) as to why your stats engine didn't record the proper number of downloads. Your response was to have Angelo call someone who doesn't even work in an appropriate department over at Podango. Not surprisingly, nothing came from that.
We can hash it out privately, or publicly. The problem is that the facts don't support you. Maybe other podcasters have had positive experiences with your organization. Art and I, though, have not. Waiting nearly six months to be paid such a measly amount of money for what should have been thousands of dollars isn't exactly the grease for the wheels of podcasting commerce.
I didn't even go into the other details of the piss-poor experience we've had with your organization, such as the fact that it took you nearly six months to pay out on something that was promised (or at least indicated) would be paid in 30 days. The fact that your organization has had lackluster response to legitimate complaints that Art and I have raised as well as issues of of statistic tracking that never came to resolution despite repeated emails both personal and on public lists shows to me that I can't trust your organization to self-correct.
Furthermore, I didn't disclose details in violation of our agreement, you just did. The agreement was to protect total numbers of downloads and internal CPMs. The only thing I disclosed were in general terms a few day's downloads and the fact that your stats engine was broken, and you refused to properly acknowledge that.
If you prefer, Todd, I can remove both your comment and my comment from this discussion board, and we can both agree to move on in separate directions. I stand, though, by everything I said in the original article as truth.
rizzn
· 1 year ago
@angelo: I'm really not interested, at this point, in trying to repair our relationship with TechPodcast/RawVoice. We went round and round on the TechPodcast mailing list trying to explain how there were *significant* discrepancies between how you guys and Podango (or even you guys and PodTrac) were recording downloads.
Re-hashing what happened six months ago in an effort to get paid for something you guys are going to explain away as insignificant differences between two stats recorders doesn't interest me. I want to move forward with organizations that will deliver on what they promise. I'm in the new media business, not the new media hobby.
It is significant, though, in how I feel the business as a whole views the content producers - we're a commodity. I can see, from a network perspective, how you can view it that way. But when a quality show amasses a significant audience, and then is under contract to be paid for advertising services rendered, one would imagine he has a reasonable expectation for payment.
All I'm searching for is the company that thinks the same as me on that.
Todd Cochrane
· 1 year ago
Mark
You knew the requirements for the campaign and to date no one else has had any issues as you are complaining about. It is your responsibility to be able utilize our stats engine or arrange for the submission of verifiable data.
You were signed up to deliver a maximum of 75,000 downloads for the six week period and fell far short in being able to deliver those kinds of numbers.
Your campaign ended Sept 30 and you were paid in Dec this is not six months. You were part of a end of quarter plus up campaign which was a 6 week run.
Billing was submitted on Oct 5th and you were paid in early December so lets stick to the facts on how long it took you to get paid.
If you can provide verifiable statistics that break out US and Canadian downloads for the period I would be happy to review your account.
But your comments on not being paid fairly is unfair. Did you call me, did you ask for an account review, did you try and submit any other raw log files you may have had?
I can only pay you on what you can prove you delivered up to the maximum downloads your were authorized.
This is why we require every podcaster on a ad buy to use our stats service and to date only 1-2 have had implementation issues and you are one of them.
Todd..
Art Lindsey III
· 1 year ago
I've been waiting for this for a long, long time. Ladies and gentlemen: Todd Cochrane is a liar. I find his comment of our "September stats being non existent" interesting, considering we continued to do the show until December 6th. He can talk about August through September all he wants, and he can make all the bogus assertions he wants. It still doesn't account for October through December. I cannot tell you how many times we had gotten emails from Todd stating that we had not turned our ad timestamps and such things in on time. This was particularly maddening, because I compiled the data myself. Sometimes it would be up to three times and Todd would claim not to have received it. Mark attempted to call Todd many times regarding such issues, but Todd rarely returned calls. When he actually *did* return calls, all he would say is, Payment is going to be a little late." This went on for months, and we continued to run an ad for which we were not receiving compensation. We kept plugging on in good faith, violating no agreements, mind you, to no avail. We provided Todd with all the information he required, and we often went beyond. More than that, we have screenshots from Podango to prove our numbers. When he finally did pay us, it was a mere pittance in comparison to what we were promised. On a personal note, I do not appreciate Todd’s intimation that we don’t understand our numbers. On the contrary, I’ve been involved in the distribution of Internet audio entertainment for nearly a decade. If anybody understand the numbers and knows how to read them, it’s me. I’ve forgotten more about this “industry†than Mr. Cochrane will ever know, or hope to learn. I have worked very hard to turn this wonderful medium into a viable revenue stream for anyone who wants it. Unfortunately, Todd Cochrane, whom I initially gave the benefit of the doubt to, but whom in fact is nothing more than a Johnny-Come-Lately who wooed everybody into thinking he was an “expert†by writing a “book†about podcasting. Again, laughable. If you need that many pages to discribe how distribute audio on the internet, you really should be on a respirator. The one constant I have found about him as time as passed, no matter who I’ve talked to, be they podcast company or prevalent podcaster, they all say the same thing: Todd Cochrane is a selfish huckster. No one likes Todd Cochrane. Truth is, it’s Todd and people like him who hold the industry back. The sooner he goes away, the better off we will all be.
rizzn
· 1 year ago
@todd: if you recall, yes, we spoke on the phone, we exchanged emails, we traded raw stats, and we discussed publicly (on a group mailing list) the discrepancies.
I don't make allegations like this lightly. If I felt like there was something worth repairing or working with moving forward, I would not burn this bridge publicly. Getting defensive on this, Todd, instead of handling your business properly in the past, only makes you look bad.
To clarify, RawVoice is the only organization that has so vastly under-estimated our statistics. PodTrac, Podango, TalkShoe, Google Analytics and FeedBurner all provided statistics that were in line with each other, to a predictable degree of error. RawVoice was always the odd man out. We tried to point this out to you, but the answer we got from you and Angelo was that the engine favored the advertisers, not the podcasters, so as to maintain a good relationship with them.
At the time, I warned you on the list that maintaining a good relationship with the podcasters was just as important. This is the type of thing I was talking about.
Brian Schuliger
· 1 year ago
Mark - A very fair synopsis of the problem: it is indeed the nascent ad market. And just a note to clarify the TalkShoe status of payment to hosts...
We indeed changed the payment plan while you were Hosting at TalkShoe (and have always reserved the right to do so). While you may call it "bait and switch", we would call it "changing the strategic focus of our business (to focus our Hosts on the LIVE participation aspect) AND changing the incentive payment system to reflect that." But who cares about how either of us "calls it" right? All that really matters IS the monetization opportunity (CPM rates).
TalkShoe has been paying its Hosts who follow our program of LIVE fairly well in terms of advertising "share". Many Hosts who came before you and several more after you left have been making $19cpm, and in fact that rate has remained the same since July 2007. And the good news? ...we expect to see higher rates over the next 12-18 months.
We'd love to have you back, but know it only makes sense for you, monetarily that is, if your show format works where at least 1% of your audience comes LIVE to participate.
Todd Cochrane
· 1 year ago
Art
You are on Rizwords with Mark so lets be careful and not get people confused that we are talking about two different shows here. Payments for the Oct to Jan ad buy that you are on have not started yet.
So I am not sure how you can accuse me of something that has not yet happened when it comes to the Oct to Jan campaign.
When I get back today from Vegas you will be sure that I will be pulling up the information from your show. Not only on the August-September plus up but the continuing buy that started in Oct.
It's to bad that you have resorted to this level of name calling and character defamation.
Todd..
Art Lindsey III
· 1 year ago
It's not defamation if it's true.
Todd Cochrane
· 1 year ago
Mark
It is hard to have stats in line with what others have when you are not using the stats system all of the other shows that are on the ad buy are.
We have tested and know that our Stats system is within 2% of both the Podtrac, system and the Libsyn system as independently verified by a number of our host.
When some of the biggest shows in podcasting are using our stats service delivering a million or more impressions or more per month have stats data that is very close to what other services are reporting we are very confident in the reporting.
While you may have been technical been able to use it due to your hosting provider. We do have mechanisms in place that allow you to submit the raw data that lets us process the show manually so long as we can pull the IP information to determine what are US and Canadian downloads with reasonable assurance that the stats is accurate.
You are but one of hundreds of shows on buys and the first in our experience to have a huge percentage of your audience be offshore. Thus it is critical that we be able to process the raw data logs to seperate the Canadian and US downloads.
Todd
Leesa Barnes
· 1 year ago
Here's what I don't understand - If being part of a podcast advertising network hasn't worked for you and you have such an impressive audience (I like your numbers), why the heck are you still looking for representation?
I don't get it. When something isn't working, Mark, you don't do more of it. You do something different.
There are tons of ways to make money podcasting that doesn't involve advertising or sponsorship. It's time for you to be confident and be bold and look at all the other monetization strategies that exist.
Mark Evans
· 1 year ago
Podcasts are a snap to produce but a challenge to monetize and track. As other forms of UGC such as blogs and video surge head, podcasting doesn't seem to have the same amount of mojo. I posted on this earlier this week:
I audited the statistics for your show gathered in our system to see if there could be a discrepancy and I did find one. It appears the following IP address (74.135.71.242) is repeatedly accessing your media. In November of 2007, this one IP address requested your media over 36,000 times and in December requested over 360,000 times.
There are many ways to explain why multiple requests may come from the same IP address. This can be caused by a network firewall managed by a service such as Websense. A network administrator may have blocked media from being to enforce a corporate policy. This can also be caused by an application that uses byte serving to break a large download into multiple partial requests to accelerate the download. Libsyn had this very problem last year with the Microsoft Bits application, as explained in this thread: http://forum.libsyn.com/viewtopic.php?p=5038&am...
As you can understand, we do not report the 36,000 and 360,000 requests as downloads. We limit the number of times we count the same request from the same IP to keep the download numbers from becoming inflated. It is true we do this in order to satisfy advertisers and insure other podcasters that all shows are measured in a uniform way. We have loyal advertisers because we took this extra step to ensure they are getting what we promise to deliver.
The other discrepancy with the statistics and what we are reporting to our sponsor is due to geographics. The sponsor only has a service available to citizens in the US and Canada. We were able to obtain a higher than average CPM rate by delivering downloads solely from US and Canada. For some podcasters, this was a win/win, as their US/Canadian downloads make up 85-95% of their downloads. Since your audience is so wide spread across the world, the higher CPM deal for concentrated US/Canada downloads was not beneficial for you.
I will be working on adding a feature to the RawVoice stats system that reports these uncounted requests. Please take this for what it is worth, we do care about podcasters and the industry. We are taking all the steps possible to ensure both advertisers and podcasters are satisfied in the process.
--angelo
rizzn
· 1 year ago
@angelo: I'm not sure how you can call it a lack of discrepancy, especially since you don't have my log files as a basis for comparison (or claim not to have them).
I told you that I wasn't interested in re-hashing your mistakes (and, let's face it, my mistake for choosing you guys) of the past. You and Todd have continued to drag this out, and pulled other blogging friends in on the conversation as well to attempt to orchestrate hits on my character and the quality of Mashable as a whole.
This is bush-league. Stop. Nothing you say will be able to convince me that I can trust your company again with my content.
A song lyric comes to mind, too: "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." The article isn't really about RawVoice specifically, nor was it really about the reputation of RawVoice. It was about the consistent inability for audio podcasting networks in general to sell ads *in my experience.* In my first comment to Todd, I even mentioned that other podcasters may have had good experiences with your company, but I have not.
In my communications with you in the past (when audits were refused to me), I mentioned the importance of keeping podcasters happy. That it takes a mention in a high profile blog like Mashable to get you guys on your toes and acting on something that began six months ago says something.
This detailed dirty laundry of your company's ineptitude would not be in open air if it weren't for Todd's combative responses on the message board.
This will be my last comment on the blog post about this. I have the records buried deep in my email and in other stat tracking accounts refuting your claims, but I don't really care to go through with a forensic accounting when the widely differing payments from two firms on simultaneous timelines speak for themselves.
I'm tired of it already. I was tired of this problem four months ago, when I figured my payments were never going to come, and I got further sick of it when I realized how shabby my payments were once I got them.
Feel free to have the last word. I'm done.
Art Lindsey III
· 1 year ago
Oh, I forgot something. CES. That's right. When Todd gets back from CES. The same CES that Todd wanted everybody to cover for him. Just one catch....you had to pay your own way and Todd would "Reimburse you 6 months later."
That's a classy business deal. If you're a sucker.
All Comments
If you were to go to court with a lawyer and file a suit, do you think you'd have a chance to win?
Then, once you are up, you can take some more time to look for ad solutions as they mature.
Lots of different ways still yet uncovered to be forged.. . .
@Andrew: We're currently exploring other options, at the moment. The final chapter hasn't been written on audio podcasting, or even audio podcasting at Mashable. Enough of it has been written, though, for us to make a commentary on a significant portion of the industry.
I understand your frustration, podcast advertising is definitely not a simple download numbers equal payout formula. The numbers you quoted in this post are fairly high, I am certain that something else must have been a miss with the statistics of your download numbers. If you don't mind contacting me, I would like to verify that your statistics were correctly reported by RawVoice.
Thanks,
Angelo
You were to be paid for downloads from Aug 10th to Sept 30th on the referenced campaign. Your where required to utilize our stats engine. You used it in August but Sept data is nearly non existent.
You were to be paid on US and Canadian downloads for the shows in which the ads run in during this time frame. This was in the agreement you accepted.
Your US and Canadian Audience in August was 35.1% you only had a grand total of 7500 US downloads in August and 1682 total Canadian downloads in August.
Of those downloads only a portion of them were run with the advertising embedded.
Your show in August had 65% non payable downloads.
I do not appreciate the slander, non asking of clarification from us first, and breach of your confidentiality agreement etc.
I will be happy to go further into the details if you want me to.
You seem to have trouble with everyone you work with, could it be that your downloads are really not what you think they are.
Todd Cochrane
ceo@rawvoice.com
We can hash it out privately, or publicly. The problem is that the facts don't support you. Maybe other podcasters have had positive experiences with your organization. Art and I, though, have not. Waiting nearly six months to be paid such a measly amount of money for what should have been thousands of dollars isn't exactly the grease for the wheels of podcasting commerce.
I didn't even go into the other details of the piss-poor experience we've had with your organization, such as the fact that it took you nearly six months to pay out on something that was promised (or at least indicated) would be paid in 30 days. The fact that your organization has had lackluster response to legitimate complaints that Art and I have raised as well as issues of of statistic tracking that never came to resolution despite repeated emails both personal and on public lists shows to me that I can't trust your organization to self-correct.
Furthermore, I didn't disclose details in violation of our agreement, you just did. The agreement was to protect total numbers of downloads and internal CPMs. The only thing I disclosed were in general terms a few day's downloads and the fact that your stats engine was broken, and you refused to properly acknowledge that.
If you prefer, Todd, I can remove both your comment and my comment from this discussion board, and we can both agree to move on in separate directions. I stand, though, by everything I said in the original article as truth.
Re-hashing what happened six months ago in an effort to get paid for something you guys are going to explain away as insignificant differences between two stats recorders doesn't interest me. I want to move forward with organizations that will deliver on what they promise. I'm in the new media business, not the new media hobby.
It is significant, though, in how I feel the business as a whole views the content producers - we're a commodity. I can see, from a network perspective, how you can view it that way. But when a quality show amasses a significant audience, and then is under contract to be paid for advertising services rendered, one would imagine he has a reasonable expectation for payment.
All I'm searching for is the company that thinks the same as me on that.
You knew the requirements for the campaign and to date no one else has had any issues as you are complaining about. It is your responsibility to be able utilize our stats engine or arrange for the submission of verifiable data.
You were signed up to deliver a maximum of 75,000 downloads for the six week period and fell far short in being able to deliver those kinds of numbers.
Your campaign ended Sept 30 and you were paid in Dec this is not six months. You were part of a end of quarter plus up campaign which was a 6 week run.
Billing was submitted on Oct 5th and you were paid in early December so lets stick to the facts on how long it took you to get paid.
If you can provide verifiable statistics that break out US and Canadian downloads for the period I would be happy to review your account.
But your comments on not being paid fairly is unfair. Did you call me, did you ask for an account review, did you try and submit any other raw log files you may have had?
I can only pay you on what you can prove you delivered up to the maximum downloads your were authorized.
This is why we require every podcaster on a ad buy to use our stats service and to date only 1-2 have had implementation issues and you are one of them.
Todd..
Ladies and gentlemen: Todd Cochrane is a liar. I find his comment of our "September stats being non existent" interesting, considering we continued to do the show until December 6th.
He can talk about August through September all he wants, and he can make all the bogus assertions he wants. It still doesn't account for October through December.
I cannot tell you how many times we had gotten emails from Todd stating that we had not turned our ad timestamps and such things in on time. This was particularly maddening, because I compiled the data myself. Sometimes it would be up to three times and Todd would claim not to have received it. Mark attempted to call Todd many times regarding such issues, but Todd rarely returned calls. When he actually *did* return calls, all he would say is, Payment is going to be a little late."
This went on for months, and we continued to run an ad for which we were not receiving compensation. We kept plugging on in good faith, violating no agreements, mind you, to no avail. We provided Todd with all the information he required, and we often went beyond. More than that, we have screenshots from Podango to prove our numbers.
When he finally did pay us, it was a mere pittance in comparison to what we were promised.
On a personal note, I do not appreciate Todd’s intimation that we don’t understand our numbers. On the contrary, I’ve been involved in the distribution of Internet audio entertainment for nearly a decade. If anybody understand the numbers and knows how to read them, it’s me. I’ve forgotten more about this “industry†than Mr. Cochrane will ever know, or hope to learn.
I have worked very hard to turn this wonderful medium into a viable revenue stream for anyone who wants it. Unfortunately, Todd Cochrane, whom I initially gave the benefit of the doubt to, but whom in fact is nothing more than a Johnny-Come-Lately who wooed everybody into thinking he was an “expert†by writing a “book†about podcasting. Again, laughable. If you need that many pages to discribe how distribute audio on the internet, you really should be on a respirator.
The one constant I have found about him as time as passed, no matter who I’ve talked to, be they podcast company or prevalent podcaster, they all say the same thing:
Todd Cochrane is a selfish huckster. No one likes Todd Cochrane.
Truth is, it’s Todd and people like him who hold the industry back. The sooner he goes away, the better off we will all be.
I don't make allegations like this lightly. If I felt like there was something worth repairing or working with moving forward, I would not burn this bridge publicly. Getting defensive on this, Todd, instead of handling your business properly in the past, only makes you look bad.
To clarify, RawVoice is the only organization that has so vastly under-estimated our statistics. PodTrac, Podango, TalkShoe, Google Analytics and FeedBurner all provided statistics that were in line with each other, to a predictable degree of error. RawVoice was always the odd man out. We tried to point this out to you, but the answer we got from you and Angelo was that the engine favored the advertisers, not the podcasters, so as to maintain a good relationship with them.
At the time, I warned you on the list that maintaining a good relationship with the podcasters was just as important. This is the type of thing I was talking about.
We indeed changed the payment plan while you were Hosting at TalkShoe (and have always reserved the right to do so). While you may call it "bait and switch", we would call it "changing the strategic focus of our business (to focus our Hosts on the LIVE participation aspect) AND changing the incentive payment system to reflect that." But who cares about how either of us "calls it" right? All that really matters IS the monetization opportunity (CPM rates).
TalkShoe has been paying its Hosts who follow our program of LIVE fairly well in terms of advertising "share". Many Hosts who came before you and several more after you left have been making $19cpm, and in fact that rate has remained the same since July 2007. And the good news? ...we expect to see higher rates over the next 12-18 months.
We'd love to have you back, but know it only makes sense for you, monetarily that is, if your show format works where at least 1% of your audience comes LIVE to participate.
You are on Rizwords with Mark so lets be careful and not get people confused that we are talking about two different shows here. Payments for the Oct to Jan ad buy that you are on have not started yet.
So I am not sure how you can accuse me of something that has not yet happened when it comes to the Oct to Jan campaign.
When I get back today from Vegas you will be sure that I will be pulling up the information from your show. Not only on the August-September plus up but the continuing buy that started in Oct.
It's to bad that you have resorted to this level of name calling and character defamation.
Todd..
It is hard to have stats in line with what others have when you are not using the stats system all of the other shows that are on the ad buy are.
We have tested and know that our Stats system is within 2% of both the Podtrac, system and the Libsyn system as independently verified by a number of our host.
When some of the biggest shows in podcasting are using our stats service delivering a million or more impressions or more per month have stats data that is very close to what other services are reporting we are very confident in the reporting.
While you may have been technical been able to use it due to your hosting provider. We do have mechanisms in place that allow you to submit the raw data that lets us process the show manually so long as we can pull the IP information to determine what are US and Canadian downloads with reasonable assurance that the stats is accurate.
You are but one of hundreds of shows on buys and the first in our experience to have a huge percentage of your audience be offshore. Thus it is critical that we be able to process the raw data logs to seperate the Canadian and US downloads.
Todd
I don't get it. When something isn't working, Mark, you don't do more of it. You do something different.
There are tons of ways to make money podcasting that doesn't involve advertising or sponsorship. It's time for you to be confident and be bold and look at all the other monetization strategies that exist.
http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/01/10/trying-...
I audited the statistics for your show gathered in our system to see if there could be a discrepancy and I did find one. It appears the following IP address (74.135.71.242) is repeatedly accessing your media. In November of 2007, this one IP address requested your media over 36,000 times and in December requested over 360,000 times.
There are many ways to explain why multiple requests may come from the same IP address. This can be caused by a network firewall managed by a service such as Websense. A network administrator may have blocked media from being to enforce a corporate policy. This can also be caused by an application that uses byte serving to break a large download into multiple partial requests to accelerate the download. Libsyn had this very problem last year with the Microsoft Bits application, as explained in this thread: http://forum.libsyn.com/viewtopic.php?p=5038&am...
As you can understand, we do not report the 36,000 and 360,000 requests as downloads. We limit the number of times we count the same request from the same IP to keep the download numbers from becoming inflated. It is true we do this in order to satisfy advertisers and insure other podcasters that all shows are measured in a uniform way. We have loyal advertisers because we took this extra step to ensure they are getting what we promise to deliver.
The other discrepancy with the statistics and what we are reporting to our sponsor is due to geographics. The sponsor only has a service available to citizens in the US and Canada. We were able to obtain a higher than average CPM rate by delivering downloads solely from US and Canada. For some podcasters, this was a win/win, as their US/Canadian downloads make up 85-95% of their downloads. Since your audience is so wide spread across the world, the higher CPM deal for concentrated US/Canada downloads was not beneficial for you.
I will be working on adding a feature to the RawVoice stats system that reports these uncounted requests. Please take this for what it is worth, we do care about podcasters and the industry. We are taking all the steps possible to ensure both advertisers and podcasters are satisfied in the process.
--angelo
I told you that I wasn't interested in re-hashing your mistakes (and, let's face it, my mistake for choosing you guys) of the past. You and Todd have continued to drag this out, and pulled other blogging friends in on the conversation as well to attempt to orchestrate hits on my character and the quality of Mashable as a whole.
This is bush-league. Stop. Nothing you say will be able to convince me that I can trust your company again with my content.
A song lyric comes to mind, too: "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." The article isn't really about RawVoice specifically, nor was it really about the reputation of RawVoice. It was about the consistent inability for audio podcasting networks in general to sell ads *in my experience.* In my first comment to Todd, I even mentioned that other podcasters may have had good experiences with your company, but I have not.
In my communications with you in the past (when audits were refused to me), I mentioned the importance of keeping podcasters happy. That it takes a mention in a high profile blog like Mashable to get you guys on your toes and acting on something that began six months ago says something.
This detailed dirty laundry of your company's ineptitude would not be in open air if it weren't for Todd's combative responses on the message board.
This will be my last comment on the blog post about this. I have the records buried deep in my email and in other stat tracking accounts refuting your claims, but I don't really care to go through with a forensic accounting when the widely differing payments from two firms on simultaneous timelines speak for themselves.
I'm tired of it already. I was tired of this problem four months ago, when I figured my payments were never going to come, and I got further sick of it when I realized how shabby my payments were once I got them.
Feel free to have the last word. I'm done.
That's a classy business deal. If you're a sucker.
http://philosophical-literatu re.blogspot.com/ http://www.anarsist.org/felse fe/ http://www.bid-directory.net/ http://www.anarsist.org/