EVP Sean King of Veritone One sheds some light on podcast reviews in this article on The Verge
Obtaining bad reviews on your podcast show isn’t the end of the world, in fact, it may not matter at all for your either future listeners or prospective podcast advertisers.
In this article with The Verge, EVP of Operations, Sean King, shares about what advertisers actually care about. “We look for a great, consistent audience that has a loyal following where the subject matter is aligning with the brand. Those reviews really are just one of many measures of what that engagement may be like with the host and the content. Take a controversial host like Howard Stern. There are people that absolutely despise him, but will still go back to listen. He’d be one of those people that would have really high engagement, or high downloads, that consistency there, but may have a low score. What I would almost say is, ‘Well sure, they have a low score, but the last 15 episodes that they’ve launched have all had over 500,000 downloads.’ We’re going to look at that.”
Podcast review gaming or “bombing” has happened to more than one podcast host. All it takes is one influential individual to send hundreds of people over to leave a cascade of negative reviews. Of the two podcast platforms who do offer reviews, Apple and Castbox, and neither seem to take reviews into account when it comes to rankings or discoverability.
As many podcast fans have come to realize, the reviews aren’t typically the best source of truth when it comes to podcast quality. You can read more on this topic in the full article at The Verge