Can anyone explain this bizarre jump in streams/plays today?
OK, for context, we're a politics/current events show, put out 2 episodes a week. We've plateaued the last ~six weeks at 300 streams/episode (sucks, I know, we're trying - listener retention is great, just listeners is the problem). Day 1 is 180-200, then it dwindles from there to zero-ish by day 5 to day 7.
We released at 2 am Eastern this morning. Right now, we have (per Captivate, our host) 1,075 downloads. But only 193 are of *today's episode*.
Instead, we've had this weird and very obviously 'fake' rush into older episodes. I in fact thought the issue was perhaps in Captivate data, but Spotify is showing it now as well. (Apple hasn't updated but they seem slow in my experience to post data to Podcasts Connect.) To wit, per Spotify, we've had exactly 31 plays from an audience of 31 for each of the nine episodes published from March 20 to April 17. (Again, our normal stream numbers there would likely be something like 10 *total*.)
Per Captivate, nearly all this incremental traffic appears to be coming from the US (we're historically ~70% from Ireland, where my co-host resides). ~75% is coming on desktop browsers or apps, whereas normally (like nearly all pods, I imagine) we're overwhelmingly mobile. It's also saying we're getting the extra traffic from the Spotify desktop app *and* iTunes, so this isn't some weird issue on one platform that is tricking Captivate's data capture process.
Any idea on an explanation here? Obviously this is not a case of actual listenership, but is there some weird bot thing? Some issue with our (or others'?) RSS feed?