A week or so ago one of our podcasters on an advertising buy very publicly bashed us for supposedly under paying him. After having done a double check on his download numbers we publicly replied that we felt we had paid the podcaster fairly.

This public bashing came after I had been in Vegas for a week with little sleep, and no other forewarning. It really caught me by surprise as the podcaster was still in a current ad buy and we were not aware that the show producer was unhappy.

I instructed Angelo to digg into the stats system and make sure we had not made a mistake. He over-viewed the data and backed up my conclusions.

The podcaster was not yet satisfied and frankly neither was I because we have worked hard to make sure our podcasters are treated with absolute fairness, and his demeanor was something that we never expected or had seen before.

With so many people using the stats system we knew the accuracy was very high. After all we built that Stats service to eliminate issues like this.

After getting back from Vegas, getting some sleep and digging into the issue some more we discovered were the issue was. When I went to review the podcasters follow on monthly data it simply was not in the database under the expected keyword. The subject show had no new downloads in the follow on month which was weird because they were still in an ad buy.

Turns out what happened was that both of us were right and both were wrong. Angelo figured out that the podcaster unknown to us started using a new keyword in his stats redirect, thus all downloads were being counted on the new keyword and because each keyword has its own dataset. I had no idea they had made the switch.

Originally I calculated his payment on the old keyword not knowing about them using the new keyword. This is why I had been so adamant that our numbers were right. Well it turns out our numbers where exactly right for the old keyword but the podcaster should have been paid on the new keyword.

Tonight I instructed Barry to cut the podcaster the difference we owe him, and we are putting in some measures in the stats system that will track when someone changes their keyword in the future.

We pride ourselves in taking care of the podcasters first and foremost, and while this is the first time something like this has ever happened it was not something we had ever anticipated. I am the CEO of this company and the buck stops here, and while we should have anticipated something like this happening we did not.

Some tips for Podcasters, if you think their is a issue in your payment, please contact us early and spell out in detail why you think the payment is off. We will go the extra mile to make sure that you are satisfied and get exactly what your show is supposed to get.

Todd Cochrane