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What is the scale for popularityScore? #38

Closed ryan-lp closed 6 months ago

ryan-lp commented 6 months ago

According to TRITON DIGITAL, Hamish & Andy is the number 1 podcast in Australia with 2,091,717 monthly downloads. In the Podcast Index database it has a popularityScore of 7.

On the other hand, according to OP3, Mere Mortals has a respectable 8,314 monthly downloads. In the Podcast Index database, it has a popularityScore of 9.

Assuming the popularity score uses some sort of a logarithmic scale, you might expect Mere Mortals to have a popularityScore of 4 (its monthly downloads figure contains 4 digits, while Hamish & Andy's contains 7 digits).

I would assume this is just the case of merging different sources of data with different scales into the same database without calibration. However I would be interested to know, what is the source of data for Mere Mortals, and what is the source of data for Hamish & Andy?

For example, perhaps all scores for Blubrry podcasts come from one source and all scores for Buzzsprout come from another source?

daveajones commented 6 months ago

We have no access to first party download data for any podcasts since we are only a podcast data provider and not the CDN. Our popularity scores are a measurement of how often the podcast apps that use us request data about individual podcasts from the API. That’s the best we can do with the information we have.

ryan-lp commented 6 months ago

Got it, thanks. For now the data is skewed in the direction of early adopters but it might become more reliable over time.