I see it all the time, "I'm a top 1% podcaster." It's on LinkedIn headlines. It's in bios on "X". I've even seen it on the "About" pages of the websites of so-called 'podcast experts'. (Which I find particularly icky!) Claiming the status of having a "top 1% podcast" seems to be the new "I've got a million followers" on any social channel. Even when you know that most of them are actually bots. Because you bought them. In case you didn't know, there's a website named "Listen Notes" that willingly panders to the egos of podcasters around the world. It allows them to search their podcast in its database, and see a 'score'. That score is essentially just made up. Don't take my word for it. Here it is in their own copy. "What is Listen Score? Listen Score (LS) is a metric that shows the estimated popularity of this podcast compared to other rss-based public podcasts in the world on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher, the more popular. Calculated from 1st and 3rd party data. Updated monthly. What is Global Rank? This podcast is one of the top 5% most popular shows out of 3,384,853 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score (the estimated popularity score)." The truth is hiding in plain sight, here. "Estimated popularity" is just another way of saying "totally guessed, based on absolutely no real data". They're claiming to calculate it from 1st and 3rd party data, but what they're actually doing is taking an average accepted standard number and then multiplying it by the number of released episodes they can see in its RSS feed. Don't even get me started on their global rank which figures out its percentage based on almost four million podcasts. The truth is there are far fewer than one million active podcasts still publishing to date. So your show is being compared against literally millions of dead shows that possibly only ever released one episode or didn't even get started. So here's what we've done about this, at Podknows Podcasting. We've hired some data scientists, given them the data we have access to (actual industry data from podcast hosts) and aggregated that with formulas based on our own extensive network data, as well as that of the accepted averages from the Podcast Index and the official measurement body, the IAB. And we've created a calculator that will give you a pretty accurate ball park ranking. If it tells you you're a top 1% podcaster, then it's telling you the truth. And I'll endorse you adding that boast to any of your socials. Want to try it out for yourself? I've added it to the site as a blog post, featuring lovely pictures of the podcast manager who encouraged me to publish the tool, Lisa. Here it is if you'd like to learn more about your podcast's true ranking.
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