I pay a lot of attention to stuff like this because it's something my customers ask for. Podcasters pay good money to hosting services for demographic data on listeners. There's no good way to get that data: podcasts are RSS feeds. You see IPs and user agents. How do they know who's a 30 year old male making $70,000? You an try to match IPs with advertising databases, but good luck getting any sort of real signal out of that. That data is all inferred anyway. Hell, I bet my cell phone has two dozen IPs over the course of an average day as I connect to various wifi networks and Fi switches carriers.
And yet, people build million dollar businesses on this stuff. Blows my mind.
Edit: And yes, sometimes people play podcasts via players on the web. This makes up a tiny fraction of overall listens. It's not statistically significant.
There's no good way to get that data: podcasts are RSS feeds. You see IPs and user agents. How do they know who's a 30 year old male making $70,000? You an try to match IPs with advertising databases, but good luck getting any sort of real signal out of that. That data is all inferred anyway. Hell, I bet my cell phone has two dozen IPs over the course of an average day as I connect to various wifi networks and Fi switches carriers.
As it damn well should be.
That said, it's only a matter of time before carriers start tracking and selling this data.
It's a lot more involved than that, but reputable companies are few and far between. They reason there's so much fraud is because it's hard to prove the truth and fake results look "good" so people go with shady vendors that just make their marketing team look better.
We do account-based marketing (advertise to specific companies you want to sell to) but we're upfront on the minimum size that companies need to be to have a internet footprint. There are other methods to find people working at a company but one thing we see all the time is companies claiming to let you reach the CFO or an exact job title. That is 100% fake and it would be far more effective to just send a letter to that person instead, but people just love to believe it works.
And yet, people build million dollar businesses on this stuff. Blows my mind.
Edit: And yes, sometimes people play podcasts via players on the web. This makes up a tiny fraction of overall listens. It's not statistically significant.