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JACK: [MUSIC] One day a crow became jealous of a raven. [CAWING] That’s because people listen to

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what ravens say, but not crows. What the raven says is important because it’s a bird of omen

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and it can foretell the future. Because of this, the raven is held in great respect.

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The crow really wanted to get the same attention and reputation as the raven

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so one day he saw some travellers coming down the road and flew down to a tree by the roadside and

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cawed out as loud as he could. [CROW CAWING] The travellers were nervous and in dismay

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hearing the calls from this black bird. They feared it might be a bad omen until one of them

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who knew the difference between a crow and a raven said to his companions it’s alright, my friends.

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We can go on without fear. It’s only a crow and it means nothing. This is one of Aesop’s fables.

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The moral; those who pretend to be something they aren’t only makes themselves look ridiculous but

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maybe it also means those who are capable of knowing the difference between a crow

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and a raven will be better off in life. JACK (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC]

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These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

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I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet

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Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] JACK:

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You ever get curious about something you hear or see and scratch at it a little just to learn

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more? [MUSIC] But the more you look into it, you realize the weirder it becomes and nobody seems to

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know anything about it. The itch just grows and grows and before you know it you realize you’ve

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been going down a rabbit hole for three months investigating clues and keeping a journal full

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of notes and questions and for every answer you get it just raises more questions. So you keep

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digging and digging and desperately trying to find answers and it just totally consumes you.

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Yeah, that happened to me and I’m about to tell you what happened. It’s a black hat story but

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it’s a different kind of black hat story than the usual ones I tell. Bear with me on this

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one. It’s more like a personal research project I did, or you could say this is my first attempt

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at doing investigative journalism. It’s obvious that I’m a podcaster but check

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this out. Over half my listeners listen to me on Apple Podcast, or otherwise known as iTunes,

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but not just my show. 60% of all podcast listeners are on Apple Podcast. This is huge.

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Apple totally dominates the podcasting market. Now within the Apple Podcast app,

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or iTunes, is a list of the top podcasts which is a list of the most popular podcasts for the day.

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This is a highly sought after and prestigious list to be on. Being on this list means first

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that you made it as a podcaster but second, that you’ll get a big bump in your listeners. When I

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first launched this podcast I was so desperate to be on the list and I was telling all my friends

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rate and review my show on iTunes even if they don’t even listen to it. I started watching this

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list obsessively to see if I was on it, where I was, and who else was there ahead of me.

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Every day I checked this list and I even kept a spreadsheet of who’s there and stuff.

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I guess you could say I became obsessed with this list. I began examining it, listening to most of

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the shows on it and learning exactly how someone gets on the list. I started seeing some patterns.

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High-ranked shows were often from big networks like NPR, Wonder, and Gimlet or from celebrity

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hosts like Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, or Malcolm Gladwell. This makes sense; these shows can market

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a podcast easily because of their existing status. They can promote it on their other podcasts or

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from their million plus Twitter followers. See the thing is, Apple will never tell us the algorithm

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on how to be on their top podcast list. This is a secret because as soon as we know it, people

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will be able to exploit the algorithm and cheat it to gain ranks. But even though they’ll never

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spill the beans, I started developing a couple theories on what the algorithm might be.

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As I was doing that something strange happened. Out of nowhere a totally unknown obscure podcast

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hit the Top 200 podcasts for the whole nation. It wasn’t made by a celebrity. It didn’t have any big

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branding support. It wasn’t from any network. They had no social media presence, no website,

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and no mention anywhere on Google. What’s more is that they had no ratings and no reviews and no,

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it wasn’t a brand-new show. It had been out for two years and had fifty episodes. Even

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if a show is remotely popular it’s going to have one review or rating. For this one to be around

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for two years with neither was really odd. How in the world did this completely obscure show rise

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above 99% Invisible, Radiolab, or Reply All and make it all the way to Number 50 on the charts?

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There must have been a glitch or a bug or something on the charts. Okay, whatever.

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But as time went on I saw another show do the same thing. Shows after shows were rising up the

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charts, hanging out in the Top 200 of all podcasts for about a week and then dying off entirely. Some

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shows were understandable; they had a strong launch but people didn’t like it and they fell

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off. Some of these shows had no web presence, had zero reviews, and zero [00:05:00] ratings. [MUSIC]

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I even listened to some of these suspicious podcasts and all of them were low quality and

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some downright terrible. Something was really weird. Whatever they were doing wasn’t fair. These

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shows are doing something to break the charts, to corrupt it. Other shows are busting their

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butt and making amazing shows and earning their seat the top of the charts but then these shows

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would somehow just hack their way up. The more I looked, the more shows I saw all over the place,

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sometimes as much as thirty shows at once were all suspiciously up there.

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I’d tell you their names but literally none of these shows are anything you’ve ever heard of.

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They’re just so obscure and so small but I took notes. For the last ten years my day job has been

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detecting when a hacker is in the network. It’s my specialty to spot anomalies and I’ve learned

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to trust that little man inside me that notices when something doesn’t add up. He feels like a

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knot is in my stomach. Right now I was feeling like I swallowed a lump of concrete. Ever since

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I started this podcast I’ve been studying up on marketing strategies. At this point I’ve listened

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to hundreds of hours of podcasts about marketing and read dozens of books about marketing.

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I’ve kind of become good at it. I started reaching out to these suspicious podcasts that

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were rated high on the charts, asking what their marketing strategies were because whatever it was,

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it was totally off my radar. I got silence. None of them replied. All were very tight-lipped.

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I started looking into this more, trying to find articles on this and any information.

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Some people had theories about what was going on but nothing concrete. I was glued to the news

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about podcasting, looking for anything about this. Then I saw one guy take matters into his

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own hands, so I called him up. JOHN: My name’s John Perotti. I’m the

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manager of podcast production at WBUR and I make podcasts.

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JACK: WBUR is the largest NPR station in Boston and John spent the last five

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years making podcasts with them. JOHN: I still work on Modern Love with

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the New York Times. I work on Last Seen, our podcast with the Boston Globe.

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JACK: By the way, the podcast Last Seen is amazing. It’s about an art heist and oh my gosh,

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I bet you would really love it. John doesn’t just work on podcasts, though. He’s been working on

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NPR shows like Car Talk since way back. JOHN: I’ve pretty much worked everywhere I can

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possibly work here in Boston. JACK: John saw something one

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day and got curious. JOHN: I got a LinkedIn message

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from a podcast promoter from Bangladesh who said hey, I’m an expert. I can promote your podcast.

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You know, whatever, I just figured it was your usual junk mail.

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I screwed around with the person a little bit. They were asking $5 and then I thought you know,

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for $5 I’ll give it a shot. [MUSIC] I PayPal’d this person five bucks and I said hey look,

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I have this podcast. Here’s our RSS feed, here’s the $5. Go for it. Now I’m gonna put that this is

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an aside but it’s a very important one; this is not a podcast I work on professionally.

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This is just something that me and my friends had made like a year and half

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ago. It had three hundred downloads. There’s no way this podcast should be on the charts.

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No reviews, no nothing, right. I come in the next day, this is a Friday,

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and the guy says hey, today’s – it’s go-time. It’s gonna happen.

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I start watching and my podcast starts climbing the charts.

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Still no reviews, still three hundred – nothing really seemed to have changed in my analytics but

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boom, starts rising, rising on the Arts charts. 90, 50, 60. It makes it all the way up to Number 2

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on the Arts charts midday and Number 55 on the All Categories charts. Then the guy sends me another

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message and says hey, you want to set up a monthly payment plan? I can keep your podcast up here,

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which I definitely didn’t do. I just kind of let it fall down and it took about three days to fall

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completely off the charts again. JACK: Wow, Number 55 for All Categories

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in the whole nation for $5. That’s incredible. There’s sub categories on the charts but I

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don’t care about those. It’s the All Categories that matters to me. This is the big one. This

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is the golden ticket. By being ranked in All Categories potentially means your podcast is

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going to start blowing up. John got his totally unknown show to rank 55 for just five bucks,

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beating out other shows like S-Town, Freakonomics, Lore, and Marc Maron.

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How did they do it? Let’s be clear here, this isn’t a podcast promotion at all. This isn’t

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getting real listeners to listen to your show and have it organically rise up the charts. It’s

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not marketing to some mass audience or getting new listeners. This is chart manipulation or

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algorithm hacking or something else. John wasn’t sure how they were doing it and neither was I

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but it was at this point that I became determined to figure out what was going on here.

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Like I said, my marketing game is strong and my fascination with hacking is even stronger

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so I just really wanted to know what was going on here. What’s the trick? How do you hack the

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charts? I was also curious who was behind all this. [MUSIC] [00:10:00] I’m on LinkedIn too

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and I set my profile there to say I’m a podcaster and guess what. Out of nowhere the exact same

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person who messaged John also messaged me. I had a million questions for them but their English

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wasn’t very good and they kept repeating the same thing. Sir, I’m an expert podcast promoter. Order

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me and I’ll make your podcast top rank. It was about this time I got another person message me

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on LinkedIn. Same scenario, they claimed to be an expert promoter and told me to order them.

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In the next few weeks two more people messaged me on LinkedIn and then another on Facebook. I

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had to start organizing these details better so I broke out an old journal. You know,

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one of those that you’re given at a conference with the elastic band and the pen?

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I started writing down these people’s names and any information I had on them.

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Each of them wanted me to order them so I asked where do I even order you from? They all pointed

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me to their Fiverr accounts. Fiverr is a website where you can go hire freelancers to do work for

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you. Sure enough, if you go on Fiverr and you search for podcast iTunes top rank, you’ll see

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dozens of people offering podcast promotion on iTunes. I examined these pages. I opened up twenty

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tabs of similar podcast promotions. The pricing structure was almost all the same and the English

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was all not very good. They claimed to all give top rank on iTunes charts. As I compared them up,

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every account had two strange commonalities. First of all, all the accounts were created just a few

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days or weeks ago. Second, all the accounts were from Bangladesh, specifically Dhaka,

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the capital of Bangladesh. I took a lot of screenshots and notes from

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Fiverr which generated a lot of new questions. Why were they all from Bangladesh and what exactly

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is their secret? I went back to the people on LinkedIn and asked a bunch of questions.

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What’s the tactic? How long have you been doing this? Where are you from and how does it work?

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I kept getting the run-around of answers, almost like CAN messages. They would almost always say

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the same thing in response; sir, I’m an expert podcast promoter. Order me and I’ll give you

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top rank. Nothing helpful or concrete. It was time to take this to the next level. [MUSIC]

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I asked one if I could call him and he said no, no, no calls. The second one I asked said no, too.

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The next guy I talked to was named Henry Bin. I messaged him a lot on LinkedIn and

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I learned his name isn’t Henry, it’s Rakibul. I asked Rakibul if I could talk to him on Skype.

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He said okay. [SKYPE CALLING] JACK:

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Hello? RAKIBUL: Hello, sir.

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JACK: Hi, this is Jack. RAKIBUL: Yeah. Thank

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you for adding me. JACK: Yes, of course. You’re in Dhaka?

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RAKIBUL: Yeah. I am from Dhaka. JACK: Okay, great. I talked to Rakibul

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for a while. He’s a nice guy, super sweet, studies Sociology at the university. When I asked him how

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he does his promotion he tells me. RAKIBUL: Sir, I subscribe the Apple ID on

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iTunes. JACK: He tells me

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this is his full time job. Even though he’s trying to get his degree from the university,

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he makes all his money doing this. RAKIBUL: I do it minimum

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sixteen hours a day.

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JACK: I asked where he learned how to do this and he started to tell

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me that he learned it from… RAKIBUL: One of our brothers.

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JACK: Can you give me his name? RAKIBUL: Actually, I don’t know

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that name. I learned it from my friend. JACK: This is a little suspicious. He said his

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brother taught it to him but when I asked his name, he didn’t know it and said it

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was a friend instead. I asked him if he could introduce me to the person who taught him but

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he told me that’s not possible because the guy who trained him made Rakibul promise to

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never tell anyone where he learned it from. Oh, really? Like, this just made the mystery deeper.

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Too many secrets. I felt like our conversation was getting circular and so I got off the phone

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with him. I scribbled a lot more notes down in my journal and went back to looking at other

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podcast promoters. Another guy was lighting me up on LinkedIn. His name was Sho Hag.

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I got on the phone with him. SHO: Sir, I have minimum 1,000 or more

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worldwide team. They will download promotion and listen.

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JACK: Wow, 1,000 people? There’s no way he has 1,000 people working for him around the world.

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But is this a clue? Does he have 1,000 Apple IDs or something and he uses that to subscribe with?

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More notes taken. I’m starting to feel like Carmen Sandiego now. I then asked him if he’s

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promoting any shows currently and he told me he’s promoting the Number 2 show in technology.

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Okay, I show Number 2 as [CENSORED]. SHO: Yes, yes, yes.

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JACK: That’s the one you’re promoting? SHO: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’m giving you

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the URL. JACK: This was a show that had

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some ratings and reviews but its history showed it just appeared on the charts out of nowhere,

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all of a sudden, passing by my show, the Wall Street Journal podcast, and even Reply All.

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No, it’s not part of any network or has any celebrity hosts so it just seemed

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really strange that the show was ranked so high. I asked Sho Hag over and over exactly

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how do you promote podcasts? SHO: I told you, I have a team.

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JACK: He stuck with the same story every time.

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SHO: Sir, I told you. My worldwide [00:15:00] team,

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they subscribe, download, and listens. JACK: I asked for another clue. Is there an

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office that you guys work out of? Can you show me a picture of this room with

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all these devices? SHO: Okay, one sec. I’ll

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take a picture and will give you. JACK: He sent me a photo. It looks like

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he’s in an internet café setting with three guys sitting in plastic chairs using laptops. I had no

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idea if these were really people he’s working with or not but it doesn’t matter. This is a clue and

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maybe a big one. So I printed this photo out and tacked it to my wall. I then asked him who taught

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you how to do this? SHO: Sir, I have a

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big brother. I worked many years ago. JACK: He says his big brother taught him

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but when I asked if I could meet him, Sho Hag started selling me his services again

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saying he’s a top-notch promoter and there’s no need to meet his brother. He kept asking me for

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money so at this point I let him go. I watched the charts and sure enough the show he was promoting

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fell off three days later. I tore pages out of my notebook and tacked them to the wall, too. [MUSIC]

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I broke out some red string and started connecting some dots. My wall now has a picture,

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people, places, tactics, and strings outlining the whole operation. What still seemed missing

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though is why every promoter I met was in Bangladesh. Is there some mastermind behind

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this whole thing? I went back to Rakibul and asked him to show me his equipment and he sent

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me a photo of four laptops. One was completely off but the other three had iTunes opened on it

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and our chat window was on one. Another picture for the wall. Now I have an equipment section.

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Then I get another message on LinkedIn from another promoter. I ask if we can talk on

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Skype. [SKYPE CALLING] JACK: Hello?

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PROMOTER: Hello, hi. What’s up? JACK: Hello. How are you today, sir?

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PROMOTER: Yeah, I’m fine. And you? JACK: Good. I talked with him for a while.

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He asked that I don’t use his name. It’s the first time he’s ever talked to anyone in the US.

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PROMOTER: O-M-G, my first time. JACK: He was kind of enjoying the experience.

00:16:54.560 --> 00:16:58.080
I told him I’m a journalist trying to do a story on people who are gaming the charts.

00:16:58.080 --> 00:17:00.960
I hear you clicking a lot right now. Are you promoting right now?

00:17:00.960 --> 00:17:05.360
PROMOTER: Yeah, promoting right now. JACK: I ask him to explain how it’s done

00:17:05.360 --> 00:17:11.280
and he tells me everything in so much more detail than anyone else.

00:17:11.280 --> 00:17:16.880
PROMOTER: Suppose you have a podcast, okay? JACK: Click connect, sign in with an Apple ID,

00:17:16.880 --> 00:17:20.640
go to the podcast URL, subscribe, and look for the button on the far

00:17:20.640 --> 00:17:22.560
right next to the episode. PROMOTER: Then you have

00:17:22.560 --> 00:17:25.200
to click Get button. JACK: Clicking Get on all the

00:17:25.200 --> 00:17:29.760
episodes queues up all the downloads at once in the background. This counts towards your podcast

00:17:29.760 --> 00:17:34.560
ranking. So just click Get on every episode in the whole feed. No need to wait between clicks

00:17:34.560 --> 00:17:38.560
or listen to anything. Then wait a while after downloading all episodes. Wait about…

00:17:38.560 --> 00:17:41.760
PROMOTER: One minute. JACK: Then stop the downloads, log out,

00:17:41.760 --> 00:17:46.640
and log in with a new Apple ID and do it again. I asked him how many Apple IDs he has.

00:17:46.640 --> 00:17:50.480
PROMOTER: Yeah, I have ten thousand Apple ID, I have.

00:17:50.480 --> 00:17:54.240
JACK: He uses ten thousand Apple IDs to do this with and he actually

00:17:54.240 --> 00:17:58.800
offered to give me the list. PROMOTER: If you wanted to do that,

00:17:58.800 --> 00:18:02.160
I’ll give you Apple ID, no problem. JACK: You’d give me the

00:18:02.160 --> 00:18:04.480
username and password? PROMOTER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:04.480 --> 00:18:07.920
JACK: Okay. PROMOTER: Okay, this is Microsoft

00:18:07.920 --> 00:18:13.440
Excel sheet and I’ll give you, no problem. JACK: What a nice guy. These Bangladeshis were all

00:18:13.440 --> 00:18:19.040
so kind. Secretive, but kind. I asked him how many times does someone need to do this to get ranked

00:18:19.040 --> 00:18:23.200
on the All Categories chart? PROMOTER: Fifty, sixty. Yeah.

00:18:23.200 --> 00:18:28.480
Sometimes thirty, forty. JACK: [MUSIC] This is very interesting. Only

00:18:28.480 --> 00:18:33.520
fifty subscribers to get on the All Categories chart? This is so fascinating because there’s

00:18:33.520 --> 00:18:41.280
over 500,000 shows in Apple Podcast and now I have a new sense of how good the Top 200 shows are.

00:18:41.280 --> 00:18:45.360
I mean, if what he’s saying is true then theoretically the top shows are only getting

00:18:45.360 --> 00:18:50.560
about fifty new subscribers a day which doesn’t seem like that much and that’s actually a surprise

00:18:50.560 --> 00:18:56.480
to me. I felt like this was a lot of information for my wall so I thanked him for his time and got

00:18:56.480 --> 00:19:01.920
off the phone. I became curious if promoters would tell me which shows they’re promoting so I asked

00:19:01.920 --> 00:19:06.880
all of the ones I was talking to, what podcasts are you promoting right now? This took a little

00:19:06.880 --> 00:19:11.520
convincing but some of them did send me the shows they’re promoting. All were highly ranked but

00:19:11.520 --> 00:19:16.960
seemed very suspiciously high ranked. Bad cover art, lame descriptions, low effort shows.

00:19:16.960 --> 00:19:21.360
I’d rather not name any of these shows but they’re probably ones you’ve never heard of.

00:19:21.360 --> 00:19:24.880
I collected all this information and I started noticing trends, patterns,

00:19:24.880 --> 00:19:29.600
and behaviors that these podcasts were exhibiting. I stared using different tools and websites to

00:19:29.600 --> 00:19:34.640
help identify shows with these same indicators. This led me to discover many more shows that

00:19:34.640 --> 00:19:39.920
were gaming the charts. I began getting really good at spotting shows doing fake promotions.

00:19:39.920 --> 00:19:44.720
I found four fairly popular shows on the charts that had indicators they may be gaming the charts,

00:19:44.720 --> 00:19:49.680
too. So far it’s been easy to spot really small shows because their numbers are just so low,

00:19:49.680 --> 00:19:55.040
but this was new because these shows were actually popular so it made it a lot harder to detect.

00:19:55.040 --> 00:19:59.440
One show was ran by a popular author and the other was interviewing big-time celebrities.

00:19:59.440 --> 00:20:03.600
It was really shocking to see [00:20:00] how some of these shows that appear legit might

00:20:03.600 --> 00:20:08.240
actually be faking their way to the top. I couldn’t tell for sure but that little man

00:20:08.240 --> 00:20:14.000
inside me knew something was off with these shows. At this point someone on Twitter with the name

00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:18.560
John Watson started tweeting. His photo was of a young, clean-cut white guy and he was claiming

00:20:18.560 --> 00:20:24.160
to be an expert podcast promoter. He was proudly posting screenshots of the shows he was promoting,

00:20:24.160 --> 00:20:28.880
out there in the public for everyone to see. I looked at the tweet. He was claiming to

00:20:28.880 --> 00:20:34.400
promote three of the four shows I had just identified as potentially gaming the charts,

00:20:34.400 --> 00:20:39.840
shows you might even recognize but I doubt you would listen to. I reached out to the three shows

00:20:39.840 --> 00:20:44.880
asking about this and one did get back to me. They said yes, he did hire someone from Bangladesh

00:20:44.880 --> 00:20:49.280
to do this and it was a mistake. He even did an episode on his podcast about this.

00:20:49.280 --> 00:20:53.840
I looked up his show and it’s a show about the mistakes he’s made in life that have made

00:20:53.840 --> 00:20:58.800
him stronger. I kind of found it funny and was happy to see he was redeeming himself.

00:20:58.800 --> 00:21:03.920
Let’s just say the other two shows refused to speak on the record but the thing is, is seeing

00:21:03.920 --> 00:21:08.880
this tweet and getting that one other podcaster to admit that he was doing it really solidified

00:21:08.880 --> 00:21:14.320
my belief that the other ones most likely were, too. I messaged this promoter, John Watson,

00:21:14.320 --> 00:21:20.080
asking if we could talk on Skype. Wait, I just realized John Watson is Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick.

00:21:20.080 --> 00:21:25.520
Gosh, is someone messing with me? Well, the game’s afoot now. [MUSIC]

00:21:25.520 --> 00:21:30.480
John’s Twitter picture is of a young, fashionable white guy with good-looking hair and John is

00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:34.880
claiming to be promoting three big podcasts that triggered three of my indicators for potentially

00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:40.640
gaming the charts. I’m hoping John is some native English speaker, maybe the guy who started it all.

00:21:40.640 --> 00:21:45.726
After what seems like months I finally get him to talk on the phone. [SKYPE CALLING]

00:21:45.726 --> 00:21:47.920
JACK: Hello? JISON: Hello?

00:21:47.920 --> 00:21:51.590
JACK: Hello, are you there? JISON: [Inaudible] this now.

00:21:51.590 --> 00:21:56.640
JACK: Nope, not a native English speaker. He tells me he’s from Bangladesh and his name isn’t John,

00:21:56.640 --> 00:22:01.600
it’s Jison. I look up at my wall of people and faces and realize every single one of

00:22:01.600 --> 00:22:05.680
them have given me a fake name at first. JISON: Sir, I have a worldwide team.

00:22:05.680 --> 00:22:09.600
JACK: Sir, I have a worldwide team. They can market your podcast and

00:22:09.600 --> 00:22:13.037
provide real and organic customers. JISON: …real and organic customers.

00:22:13.037 --> 00:22:17.440
JACK: He says he’s promoted fifteen podcasts and charged $500 a month and says he has a

00:22:17.440 --> 00:22:22.400
lot of repeat customers. If this is true, Jison has pulled in over $5,000 doing this.

00:22:22.400 --> 00:22:26.320
That’s a lot for Dhaka. He goes on to tell me that he can deliver 1,000 new subscribers

00:22:26.320 --> 00:22:31.120
a month which will be enough to get me in the Top 200. I asked Jison specifically how he gets

00:22:31.120 --> 00:22:36.160
so many new subscribers. He tells me. JISON: Actually it’s a secret because…

00:22:36.160 --> 00:22:39.680
JACK: He says it’s a secret because if he told me I wouldn’t need to hire promoters.

00:22:39.680 --> 00:22:44.320
I ask him the burning question, the question nobody wants to tell me the answer to.

00:22:44.320 --> 00:22:54.080
Where did you learn this from? JISON: Sir, in the past I learned from my boss.

00:22:54.080 --> 00:23:02.080
He’s the best podcast promoter in my country. He’s not only my country, in the world I think,

00:23:02.080 --> 00:23:04.320
because I love him so much. JACK: What’s his name?

00:23:04.320 --> 00:23:08.335
JISON: MD Monowar, sir. JACK: Say again?

00:23:08.335 --> 00:23:12.880
JISON: His name is MD Monowar, sir. JACK: MD Monowar.

00:23:12.880 --> 00:23:18.240
Finally going up the chain. I drew a big question mark on an index card, wrote Monowar on it and

00:23:18.240 --> 00:23:22.811
tacked it to my wall. I listened further. JISON: He’s the person from…

00:23:22.811 --> 00:23:27.200
JACK: Monowar is the first person who discovered how iTunes podcast promotions worked.

00:23:27.200 --> 00:23:30.720
After that he trains up young people. At this point everyone who learned about

00:23:30.720 --> 00:23:35.840
podcast promotion learned it from him, so we’re in love with him so much.

00:23:35.840 --> 00:23:41.280
JISON: Love him so much. JACK: Out of nowhere our Skype call drops but the

00:23:41.280 --> 00:23:46.000
new card I just put on the wall, I remove it and I put it above all the others now, thinking this

00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:51.360
might be the main guy, the one who started this whole thing and popularized this in Bangladesh.

00:23:51.360 --> 00:23:58.000
MD Monowar. Maybe he has all the secrets, all the answers. Maybe he’d even teach me all the tactics.

00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:02.640
I turned all my focus to finding him. Could I do it from the other side of the planet?

00:24:02.640 --> 00:24:09.760
I barely have any information other than his name. Even if I did find him, would he tell me anything?

00:24:09.760 --> 00:24:13.280
After the break we talk about books, we hear from Seth Godin.

00:24:13.280 --> 00:24:21.520
SETH: Hey. JACK: And maybe Monowar. Maybe. [MUSIC]

00:24:21.520 --> 00:24:25.680
I feel like I’m deep in this rabbit hole now so I decide to take a drive.

00:24:25.680 --> 00:24:28.880
I head over to the bookstore and just start browsing around.

00:24:28.880 --> 00:24:34.320
The first rack of books I saw was titled New York Times Bestseller List.

00:24:34.320 --> 00:24:40.320
List; my eyes narrowed. You ever get so deep into something that everywhere you look you just

00:24:40.320 --> 00:24:44.720
can’t stop seeing it? Or if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

00:24:44.720 --> 00:24:50.000
I was now wondering is it possible to corrupt the New York Times Bestseller List? Right there in the

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.720
bookstore I got on Twitter and messaged Phil Stamper. Phil works for a big book publisher

00:24:54.720 --> 00:24:59.440
in New York which gives him early access to the list but not only that, Phil is an up and coming

00:24:59.440 --> 00:25:03.760
author so he’s glued to the [00:25:00] list, always watching what’s coming and going on it. I

00:25:03.760 --> 00:25:09.120
asked him what it means to be on the list.