Blubrry Achieves Certification

My company Blubrry Podcasting has made history as the first podcast-hosting service provider to have its podcast stats certified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab for Podcast Measurement Compliance. My team has spent the better part of the past 5 months going through the audit and certification.

There is nothing like having your entire code-base and processes examined line by line in code review and all the other task of fraud prevention etc.. My team at Blubrry has put in an incredible amount of work to get here. Remarkably nothing really changed with our codebase and processing that has been locked down for the past 5 years.

It’s ironic there were calls that the podcast measurement space was the wild wild west by supposed leaders in the space, who were themselves running on measurement systems that were not in compliance with the guidelines agreed to by the IAB committee that they participated in.  Yet the code Blubrry has had in place since 2005 and tweaked throughout the years and locked down in 2013 was the same exact codebase that meets the certification standards from the IAB podcast measurement v2.0 guidelines we helped craft along with 31 other companies that were adopted in 2017.

We already know who the bad players are out there, who to date has done little to correct the overcounting their platforms are notorious for. and they will likely do little to come into certification compliance until they are forced to. My team, come the first of the year will be meeting with media buyers and explaining their podcast measurement options.

Certification for all Podcasters

Blubrry is unique in the space as our system is “platform agnostic” and we can integrate certified stats for podcast hosting companies and media buyers that are looking to become certified or those media buyers that need a way of auditing the campaigns they are running with the various companies that do not have their own measurement system or free ride on services like ours.

We have been working towards guaranteeing a level playing field for a long time and I truly feel that our podcast statistics platform is going to expedite the space in getting there due to the flexibility of the platform in measuring nearly every show in the podcasting space if desired. The download is and will remain king for the foreseeable future, unlike the streaming space there are too many independent players to guarantee that we will ever get the client-side measurement in place in any meaningful way. A key takeaway is that our Podcast measurement platform is open to all podcasters regardless of where they host their media.

Advertising CPM’s to Increase.

Additionally CPM’s should rise as the over-reporting that has occurred by some networks will now be adjusted to certified guidelines and the value that advertisers have been getting from the space will increase even though the download stats are lower on most platforms.

We know that there are other companies attempting to become certified, and that will not come without major pain as adjustments will have to be made to their measuring algorithms.  This is the gold standard. There is no substitution to certification of compliance, Ad buyers, networks, podcast hosting platforms, and podcasters now have an audited, validated, certified platform ready to serve them.”

The certification audit included reviews of our platform architecture, filtering, file threshold levels, identity, aggregate uniques, metrics generation, website player reviews and recommendations, disclosures and external audit of the code line by line. More than 50,000 podcasters have trusted Blubrry stats for 13 years, whether they host with Blubrry or not.