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