The more downloads a company has, the more clout it has, and the more revenue it gets. Some companies come by those numbers in a different way. According to a new report, some of the web's biggest podcast distributors have been buying downloads in order to encourage engagement.
Some companies are inflating their numbers by paying mobile advertising firms to display their ads in mobile games, according to a report. The ads reward people who click on them with more in-game points or rewards, but they also automate the download of a show onto the phone of people who have already downloaded it. The increased web traffic is translated into additional ad sales for the companies.
This tactic has been used by some companies. iHeart has spent $10 million over the past four years procuring six million unique Listeners for its programs. The New York Post has been increasing the number of downloads.
Deep See, a fraud detection company that recently began looking into a trend called " rewarded traffic", published research on the topic earlier in the year. This trend is defined by researchers as an arrangement in which web users are paid to visit a website. Most of the ways it can be done involve something similar to the podcasting strategy, where mobile users are incentivized to engage with a specific website or product via rewards, points, or some other digital prize.
Millions of daily visits to ad-monetized publisher destinations have probably been generated this way. Advertisers don't know that they're paying to reach a user who is interacting with the publisher's content
The Jun Group is a mobile advertising firm that tells clients it can increase sales for their product by matching the right message to the right customers.
The CEO of Jun Group argues that advertising is just like any other form of self-promotion. All of the largest brands in the world invest a lot of money in brand awareness because without it you have no chance of breaking through the noise, he said in an interview. Every publisher has invested in marketing to promote themselves since the dawn of time and this is just another way of doing it.
If the New York Post, Jun Group, and iHeart Media respond, we will update this story.
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