Comment by chromacity
1 month ago
HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us.
So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.
There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.
How is a listen to a podcast counted?
If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?
Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.
As I understand Spotify et al may do something a bit more sophisticated, but the traditional model for podcast analytics purely tracks downloads, which could very well be your client auto-downloading a subscribed episode you never play. I don't think anyone actually has visibility of "listens". And the traditional model for ad sales is a creator (or an agent on their behalf) emailing a brand "Hey, we make this podcast which gets X monthly downloads, want to buy an ad read?" I think they usually point to iTunes store rankings to somewhat support these claims but again, iTunes just tracks downloads. (Obviously, this is all rife for fraud.)
In some ways it doesn't really matter because once you've got enough data points you'll know what percentage of views result in an ad click (or whatever) and then you can figure out how many views you need to hit your revenue targets.