iHeartMedia purchased podcast plays to game their download numbers and the IAB says it's ok!? John Spurlock talks OP3.dev and how it could help filter this bad practice.
Players get game tokens if they listen to a podcast for just twenty seconds. (Carman posts a graphic). But, because more than 60 seconds of audio are downloaded by the player, as demonstrated in this article in Sounds Profitable, these plays count as an IAB-certified download from podcast hosts and in prefix services like Podtrac. That allows podcasts promoted in this way to charge for the ads delivered in the show, and for that traffic to be counted in rankers
Players get game tokens if they listen to a podcast for just twenty seconds. (Carman posts a graphic). But, because more than 60 seconds of audio are downloaded by the player, as demonstrated in this article in Sounds Profitable, these plays count as an IAB-certified download from podcast hosts and in prefix services like Podtrac. That allows podcasts promoted in this way to charge for the ads delivered in the show, and for that traffic to be counted in rankers