Precipitous Drop in Rankings and New and Noteworthy?

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Precipitous Drop in Rankings and New and Noteworthy?

I'm just curious if anyone has any wisdom on how the whole iTunes ranking and New and Noteworthy system works.

My show suffered a precipitous drop in iTunes rankings (from around #39-40 in comedy to >100) recently. In addition, we always (well, I say "always" but we've only been doing this since May 2012) showed up in New and Noteworthy after releasing a new podcast, often spending a little time at #1. Now we've disappeared from N&N altogether.

Now, we had some technical difficulties with a few shows that I wasn't aware of and I thought perhaps that had chased off some listeners, but the weird thing is that our downloads as seen in our host's statistics have continued to rise with every show. In fact, the last show we did broke all records for us for a one day download but we still fell in the iTunes rankings. With fewer downloads in the past we would have been at the top of the New and Noteworthy chart.

So beside negatively affecting my narcissistic tendencies, I'm just curious if anyone can explain how this all works. If it is NEW subscribers, then I can see dropping in the rankings as one's audience matures and new subs drop off.

Interestingly, this drop off occured when I started tagging my shows on a different computer than before, though I've checked the tags and I can't imagine how this would affect iTunes rankings.

My iTunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/weird-medicine-the-podcast/id527328503

My feed:

http://weirdmedicine.libsyn.com/rss

It drives me crazy not to know how things work; any help with this?

THANKS!

your pal,

Steve

Posted on Jul 19, 2012 7:15 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Robert Walch

Level 4

2,502 points

Jul 19, 2012 7:44 AM in response to LobstaJohnson2

Hi Steve,

iTunes top lists are based on new subscribers for the past week.

It is NOT based on all time subscribers - if it was the list would never change.

So your drop out of the top 100 is based on your number of new subscribers dropping off.

Make sure when you link to your show in iTunes - you link directly to the iTunes store page for people to subscribe - that way you get credit for new subscriptions.

On your website check to see what you have for your "subscribe" link.

Regards,

Rob W

libsyn

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Answer 2

Jul 19, 2012 10:44 AM in response to Robert Walch

Thanks Rob!

I figured it was a function of "velocity" (rate of change over time) rather than absolute numbers. There was some pent-up demand when we started our podcast in May but now the audience has matured; we're still growing but not at the same rate as before.

I'm assuming there are different algorithms for "New and Noteworthy", "What's Hot", and the actual numerical rankings, with different weights on different variables but I'm too dumb to dope it out on my own.

I do think more people are listening to us on platforms other than iTunes, too, which would affect things (Libsyn, RSS, Stitcher, 3rd party apps, etc).

We just did so well for the first 6 weeks that it drove me crazy that all of a sudden we just dropped off the face of the earth. :-)

your pal,

Steve

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