Spotify even fucks over podcasters a little differently. There is no tracking, no cookies, no Facebook tracking pixels, in the RSS feeds that is podcasting. So

Spotify even fucks over podcasters a little differently. There is no tracking, no cookies, no Facebook tracking pixels, in the RSS feeds that is podcasting. So how does one know "How big is my audience, how many people hear my ads, how can I argue that the ad agency should give me more money?" Well, the simplest way was to count downloads. Which, while slightly inflated, is a reasonable approximation for "One download, one likely listen". Because we all know it's inflated, it's easy for you and the ad agency to add a fudge-factor of "...minus the ten percent or so that have stopped listening but haven't stopped the auto-download" But only Spotify knows how many people listened to the episode that Spotify grabbed, then served to their subscribers. Spotify is artificially shrinking the audience podcasters can say they're advertising to, especially smaller podcasters - because with less than a thousand streams or so, no fucking chance Spotify will tell you [in a timely fashion] how many people listened to you