JACK: [MUSIC] One day a crow became jealous of a raven. [CAWING] That’s because people listen to
what ravens say, but not crows. What the raven says is important because it’s a bird of omen
and it can foretell the future. Because of this, the raven is held in great respect.
The crow really wanted to get the same attention and reputation as the raven
so one day he saw some travellers coming down the road and flew down to a tree by the roadside and
cawed out as loud as he could. [CROW CAWING] The travellers were nervous and in dismay
hearing the calls from this black bird. They feared it might be a bad omen until one of them
who knew the difference between a crow and a raven said to his companions it’s alright, my friends.
We can go on without fear. It’s only a crow and it means nothing. This is one of Aesop’s fables.
The moral; those who pretend to be something they aren’t only makes themselves look ridiculous but
maybe it also means those who are capable of knowing the difference between a crow
and a raven will be better off in life. JACK (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC]
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.
I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet
Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] JACK:
You ever get curious about something you hear or see and scratch at it a little just to learn
more? [MUSIC] But the more you look into it, you realize the weirder it becomes and nobody seems to
know anything about it. The itch just grows and grows and before you know it you realize you’ve
been going down a rabbit hole for three months investigating clues and keeping a journal full
of notes and questions and for every answer you get it just raises more questions. So you keep
digging and digging and desperately trying to find answers and it just totally consumes you.
Yeah, that happened to me and I’m about to tell you what happened. It’s a black hat story but
it’s a different kind of black hat story than the usual ones I tell. Bear with me on this
one. It’s more like a personal research project I did, or you could say this is my first attempt
at doing investigative journalism. It’s obvious that I’m a podcaster but check
this out. Over half my listeners listen to me on Apple Podcast, or otherwise known as iTunes,
but not just my show. 60% of all podcast listeners are on Apple Podcast. This is huge.
Apple totally dominates the podcasting market. Now within the Apple Podcast app,
or iTunes, is a list of the top podcasts which is a list of the most popular podcasts for the day.
This is a highly sought after and prestigious list to be on. Being on this list means first
that you made it as a podcaster but second, that you’ll get a big bump in your listeners. When I
first launched this podcast I was so desperate to be on the list and I was telling all my friends
rate and review my show on iTunes even if they don’t even listen to it. I started watching this
list obsessively to see if I was on it, where I was, and who else was there ahead of me.
Every day I checked this list and I even kept a spreadsheet of who’s there and stuff.
I guess you could say I became obsessed with this list. I began examining it, listening to most of
the shows on it and learning exactly how someone gets on the list. I started seeing some patterns.
High-ranked shows were often from big networks like NPR, Wonder, and Gimlet or from celebrity
hosts like Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, or Malcolm Gladwell. This makes sense; these shows can market
a podcast easily because of their existing status. They can promote it on their other podcasts or
from their million plus Twitter followers. See the thing is, Apple will never tell us the algorithm
on how to be on their top podcast list. This is a secret because as soon as we know it, people
will be able to exploit the algorithm and cheat it to gain ranks. But even though they’ll never
spill the beans, I started developing a couple theories on what the algorithm might be.
As I was doing that something strange happened. Out of nowhere a totally unknown obscure podcast
hit the Top 200 podcasts for the whole nation. It wasn’t made by a celebrity. It didn’t have any big
branding support. It wasn’t from any network. They had no social media presence, no website,
and no mention anywhere on Google. What’s more is that they had no ratings and no reviews and no,
it wasn’t a brand-new show. It had been out for two years and had fifty episodes. Even
if a show is remotely popular it’s going to have one review or rating. For this one to be around
for two years with neither was really odd. How in the world did this completely obscure show rise
above 99% Invisible, Radiolab, or Reply All and make it all the way to Number 50 on the charts?
There must have been a glitch or a bug or something on the charts. Okay, whatever.
But as time went on I saw another show do the same thing. Shows after shows were rising up the
charts, hanging out in the Top 200 of all podcasts for about a week and then dying off entirely. Some
shows were understandable; they had a strong launch but people didn’t like it and they fell
off. Some of these shows had no web presence, had zero reviews, and zero [00:05:00] ratings. [MUSIC]
I even listened to some of these suspicious podcasts and all of them were low quality and
some downright terrible. Something was really weird. Whatever they were doing wasn’t fair. These
shows are doing something to break the charts, to corrupt it. Other shows are busting their
butt and making amazing shows and earning their seat the top of the charts but then these shows
would somehow just hack their way up. The more I looked, the more shows I saw all over the place,
sometimes as much as thirty shows at once were all suspiciously up there.
I’d tell you their names but literally none of these shows are anything you’ve ever heard of.
They’re just so obscure and so small but I took notes. For the last ten years my day job has been
detecting when a hacker is in the network. It’s my specialty to spot anomalies and I’ve learned
to trust that little man inside me that notices when something doesn’t add up. He feels like a
knot is in my stomach. Right now I was feeling like I swallowed a lump of concrete. Ever since
I started this podcast I’ve been studying up on marketing strategies. At this point I’ve listened
to hundreds of hours of podcasts about marketing and read dozens of books about marketing.
I’ve kind of become good at it. I started reaching out to these suspicious podcasts that
were rated high on the charts, asking what their marketing strategies were because whatever it was,
it was totally off my radar. I got silence. None of them replied. All were very tight-lipped.
I started looking into this more, trying to find articles on this and any information.
Some people had theories about what was going on but nothing concrete. I was glued to the news
about podcasting, looking for anything about this. Then I saw one guy take matters into his
own hands, so I called him up. JOHN: My name’s John Perotti. I’m the
manager of podcast production at WBUR and I make podcasts.
JACK: WBUR is the largest NPR station in Boston and John spent the last five
years making podcasts with them. JOHN: I still work on Modern Love with
the New York Times. I work on Last Seen, our podcast with the Boston Globe.
JACK: By the way, the podcast Last Seen is amazing. It’s about an art heist and oh my gosh,
I bet you would really love it. John doesn’t just work on podcasts, though. He’s been working on
NPR shows like Car Talk since way back. JOHN: I’ve pretty much worked everywhere I can
possibly work here in Boston. JACK: John saw something one
day and got curious. JOHN: I got a LinkedIn message
from a podcast promoter from Bangladesh who said hey, I’m an expert. I can promote your podcast.
You know, whatever, I just figured it was your usual junk mail.
I screwed around with the person a little bit. They were asking $5 and then I thought you know,
for $5 I’ll give it a shot. [MUSIC] I PayPal’d this person five bucks and I said hey look,
I have this podcast. Here’s our RSS feed, here’s the $5. Go for it. Now I’m gonna put that this is
an aside but it’s a very important one; this is not a podcast I work on professionally.
This is just something that me and my friends had made like a year and half
ago. It had three hundred downloads. There’s no way this podcast should be on the charts.
No reviews, no nothing, right. I come in the next day, this is a Friday,
and the guy says hey, today’s – it’s go-time. It’s gonna happen.
I start watching and my podcast starts climbing the charts.
Still no reviews, still three hundred – nothing really seemed to have changed in my analytics but
boom, starts rising, rising on the Arts charts. 90, 50, 60. It makes it all the way up to Number 2
on the Arts charts midday and Number 55 on the All Categories charts. Then the guy sends me another
message and says hey, you want to set up a monthly payment plan? I can keep your podcast up here,
which I definitely didn’t do. I just kind of let it fall down and it took about three days to fall
completely off the charts again. JACK: Wow, Number 55 for All Categories
in the whole nation for $5. That’s incredible. There’s sub categories on the charts but I
don’t care about those. It’s the All Categories that matters to me. This is the big one. This
is the golden ticket. By being ranked in All Categories potentially means your podcast is
going to start blowing up. John got his totally unknown show to rank 55 for just five bucks,
beating out other shows like S-Town, Freakonomics, Lore, and Marc Maron.
How did they do it? Let’s be clear here, this isn’t a podcast promotion at all. This isn’t
getting real listeners to listen to your show and have it organically rise up the charts. It’s
not marketing to some mass audience or getting new listeners. This is chart manipulation or
algorithm hacking or something else. John wasn’t sure how they were doing it and neither was I
but it was at this point that I became determined to figure out what was going on here.
Like I said, my marketing game is strong and my fascination with hacking is even stronger
so I just really wanted to know what was going on here. What’s the trick? How do you hack the
charts? I was also curious who was behind all this. [MUSIC] [00:10:00] I’m on LinkedIn too
and I set my profile there to say I’m a podcaster and guess what. Out of nowhere the exact same
person who messaged John also messaged me. I had a million questions for them but their English
wasn’t very good and they kept repeating the same thing. Sir, I’m an expert podcast promoter. Order
me and I’ll make your podcast top rank. It was about this time I got another person message me
on LinkedIn. Same scenario, they claimed to be an expert promoter and told me to order them.
In the next few weeks two more people messaged me on LinkedIn and then another on Facebook. I
had to start organizing these details better so I broke out an old journal. You know,
one of those that you’re given at a conference with the elastic band and the pen?
I started writing down these people’s names and any information I had on them.
Each of them wanted me to order them so I asked where do I even order you from? They all pointed
me to their Fiverr accounts. Fiverr is a website where you can go hire freelancers to do work for
you. Sure enough, if you go on Fiverr and you search for podcast iTunes top rank, you’ll see
dozens of people offering podcast promotion on iTunes. I examined these pages. I opened up twenty
tabs of similar podcast promotions. The pricing structure was almost all the same and the English
was all not very good. They claimed to all give top rank on iTunes charts. As I compared them up,
every account had two strange commonalities. First of all, all the accounts were created just a few
days or weeks ago. Second, all the accounts were from Bangladesh, specifically Dhaka,
the capital of Bangladesh. I took a lot of screenshots and notes from
Fiverr which generated a lot of new questions. Why were they all from Bangladesh and what exactly
is their secret? I went back to the people on LinkedIn and asked a bunch of questions.
What’s the tactic? How long have you been doing this? Where are you from and how does it work?
I kept getting the run-around of answers, almost like CAN messages. They would almost always say
the same thing in response; sir, I’m an expert podcast promoter. Order me and I’ll give you
top rank. Nothing helpful or concrete. It was time to take this to the next level. [MUSIC]
I asked one if I could call him and he said no, no, no calls. The second one I asked said no, too.
The next guy I talked to was named Henry Bin. I messaged him a lot on LinkedIn and
I learned his name isn’t Henry, it’s Rakibul. I asked Rakibul if I could talk to him on Skype.
He said okay. [SKYPE CALLING] JACK:
Hello? RAKIBUL: Hello, sir.
JACK: Hi, this is Jack. RAKIBUL: Yeah. Thank
you for adding me. JACK: Yes, of course. You’re in Dhaka?
RAKIBUL: Yeah. I am from Dhaka. JACK: Okay, great. I talked to Rakibul
for a while. He’s a nice guy, super sweet, studies Sociology at the university. When I asked him how
he does his promotion he tells me. RAKIBUL: Sir, I subscribe the Apple ID on
iTunes. JACK: He tells me
this is his full time job. Even though he’s trying to get his degree from the university,
he makes all his money doing this. RAKIBUL: I do it minimum
sixteen hours a day.
JACK: I asked where he learned how to do this and he started to tell
me that he learned it from… RAKIBUL: One of our brothers.
JACK: Can you give me his name? RAKIBUL: Actually, I don’t know
that name. I learned it from my friend. JACK: This is a little suspicious. He said his
brother taught it to him but when I asked his name, he didn’t know it and said it
was a friend instead. I asked him if he could introduce me to the person who taught him but
he told me that’s not possible because the guy who trained him made Rakibul promise to
never tell anyone where he learned it from. Oh, really? Like, this just made the mystery deeper.
Too many secrets. I felt like our conversation was getting circular and so I got off the phone
with him. I scribbled a lot more notes down in my journal and went back to looking at other
podcast promoters. Another guy was lighting me up on LinkedIn. His name was Sho Hag.
I got on the phone with him. SHO: Sir, I have minimum 1,000 or more
worldwide team. They will download promotion and listen.
JACK: Wow, 1,000 people? There’s no way he has 1,000 people working for him around the world.
But is this a clue? Does he have 1,000 Apple IDs or something and he uses that to subscribe with?
More notes taken. I’m starting to feel like Carmen Sandiego now. I then asked him if he’s
promoting any shows currently and he told me he’s promoting the Number 2 show in technology.
Okay, I show Number 2 as [CENSORED]. SHO: Yes, yes, yes.
JACK: That’s the one you’re promoting? SHO: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’m giving you
the URL. JACK: This was a show that had
some ratings and reviews but its history showed it just appeared on the charts out of nowhere,
all of a sudden, passing by my show, the Wall Street Journal podcast, and even Reply All.
No, it’s not part of any network or has any celebrity hosts so it just seemed
really strange that the show was ranked so high. I asked Sho Hag over and over exactly
how do you promote podcasts? SHO: I told you, I have a team.
JACK: He stuck with the same story every time.
SHO: Sir, I told you. My worldwide [00:15:00] team,
they subscribe, download, and listens. JACK: I asked for another clue. Is there an
office that you guys work out of? Can you show me a picture of this room with
all these devices? SHO: Okay, one sec. I’ll
take a picture and will give you. JACK: He sent me a photo. It looks like
he’s in an internet café setting with three guys sitting in plastic chairs using laptops. I had no
idea if these were really people he’s working with or not but it doesn’t matter. This is a clue and
maybe a big one. So I printed this photo out and tacked it to my wall. I then asked him who taught
you how to do this? SHO: Sir, I have a
big brother. I worked many years ago. JACK: He says his big brother taught him
but when I asked if I could meet him, Sho Hag started selling me his services again
saying he’s a top-notch promoter and there’s no need to meet his brother. He kept asking me for
money so at this point I let him go. I watched the charts and sure enough the show he was promoting
fell off three days later. I tore pages out of my notebook and tacked them to the wall, too. [MUSIC]
I broke out some red string and started connecting some dots. My wall now has a picture,
people, places, tactics, and strings outlining the whole operation. What still seemed missing
though is why every promoter I met was in Bangladesh. Is there some mastermind behind
this whole thing? I went back to Rakibul and asked him to show me his equipment and he sent
me a photo of four laptops. One was completely off but the other three had iTunes opened on it
and our chat window was on one. Another picture for the wall. Now I have an equipment section.
Then I get another message on LinkedIn from another promoter. I ask if we can talk on
Skype. [SKYPE CALLING] JACK: Hello?
PROMOTER: Hello, hi. What’s up? JACK: Hello. How are you today, sir?
PROMOTER: Yeah, I’m fine. And you? JACK: Good. I talked with him for a while.
He asked that I don’t use his name. It’s the first time he’s ever talked to anyone in the US.
PROMOTER: O-M-G, my first time. JACK: He was kind of enjoying the experience.
I told him I’m a journalist trying to do a story on people who are gaming the charts.
I hear you clicking a lot right now. Are you promoting right now?
PROMOTER: Yeah, promoting right now. JACK: I ask him to explain how it’s done
and he tells me everything in so much more detail than anyone else.
PROMOTER: Suppose you have a podcast, okay? JACK: Click connect, sign in with an Apple ID,
go to the podcast URL, subscribe, and look for the button on the far
right next to the episode. PROMOTER: Then you have
to click Get button. JACK: Clicking Get on all the
episodes queues up all the downloads at once in the background. This counts towards your podcast
ranking. So just click Get on every episode in the whole feed. No need to wait between clicks
or listen to anything. Then wait a while after downloading all episodes. Wait about…
PROMOTER: One minute. JACK: Then stop the downloads, log out,
and log in with a new Apple ID and do it again. I asked him how many Apple IDs he has.
PROMOTER: Yeah, I have ten thousand Apple ID, I have.
JACK: He uses ten thousand Apple IDs to do this with and he actually
offered to give me the list. PROMOTER: If you wanted to do that,
I’ll give you Apple ID, no problem. JACK: You’d give me the
username and password? PROMOTER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JACK: Okay. PROMOTER: Okay, this is Microsoft
Excel sheet and I’ll give you, no problem. JACK: What a nice guy. These Bangladeshis were all
so kind. Secretive, but kind. I asked him how many times does someone need to do this to get ranked
on the All Categories chart? PROMOTER: Fifty, sixty. Yeah.
Sometimes thirty, forty. JACK: [MUSIC] This is very interesting. Only
fifty subscribers to get on the All Categories chart? This is so fascinating because there’s
over 500,000 shows in Apple Podcast and now I have a new sense of how good the Top 200 shows are.
I mean, if what he’s saying is true then theoretically the top shows are only getting
about fifty new subscribers a day which doesn’t seem like that much and that’s actually a surprise
to me. I felt like this was a lot of information for my wall so I thanked him for his time and got
off the phone. I became curious if promoters would tell me which shows they’re promoting so I asked
all of the ones I was talking to, what podcasts are you promoting right now? This took a little
convincing but some of them did send me the shows they’re promoting. All were highly ranked but
seemed very suspiciously high ranked. Bad cover art, lame descriptions, low effort shows.
I’d rather not name any of these shows but they’re probably ones you’ve never heard of.
I collected all this information and I started noticing trends, patterns,
and behaviors that these podcasts were exhibiting. I stared using different tools and websites to
help identify shows with these same indicators. This led me to discover many more shows that
were gaming the charts. I began getting really good at spotting shows doing fake promotions.
I found four fairly popular shows on the charts that had indicators they may be gaming the charts,
too. So far it’s been easy to spot really small shows because their numbers are just so low,
but this was new because these shows were actually popular so it made it a lot harder to detect.
One show was ran by a popular author and the other was interviewing big-time celebrities.
It was really shocking to see [00:20:00] how some of these shows that appear legit might
actually be faking their way to the top. I couldn’t tell for sure but that little man
inside me knew something was off with these shows. At this point someone on Twitter with the name
John Watson started tweeting. His photo was of a young, clean-cut white guy and he was claiming
to be an expert podcast promoter. He was proudly posting screenshots of the shows he was promoting,
out there in the public for everyone to see. I looked at the tweet. He was claiming to
promote three of the four shows I had just identified as potentially gaming the charts,
shows you might even recognize but I doubt you would listen to. I reached out to the three shows
asking about this and one did get back to me. They said yes, he did hire someone from Bangladesh
to do this and it was a mistake. He even did an episode on his podcast about this.
I looked up his show and it’s a show about the mistakes he’s made in life that have made
him stronger. I kind of found it funny and was happy to see he was redeeming himself.
Let’s just say the other two shows refused to speak on the record but the thing is, is seeing
this tweet and getting that one other podcaster to admit that he was doing it really solidified
my belief that the other ones most likely were, too. I messaged this promoter, John Watson,
asking if we could talk on Skype. Wait, I just realized John Watson is Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick.
Gosh, is someone messing with me? Well, the game’s afoot now. [MUSIC]
John’s Twitter picture is of a young, fashionable white guy with good-looking hair and John is
claiming to be promoting three big podcasts that triggered three of my indicators for potentially
gaming the charts. I’m hoping John is some native English speaker, maybe the guy who started it all.
After what seems like months I finally get him to talk on the phone. [SKYPE CALLING]
JACK: Hello? JISON: Hello?
JACK: Hello, are you there? JISON: [Inaudible] this now.
JACK: Nope, not a native English speaker. He tells me he’s from Bangladesh and his name isn’t John,
it’s Jison. I look up at my wall of people and faces and realize every single one of
them have given me a fake name at first. JISON: Sir, I have a worldwide team.
JACK: Sir, I have a worldwide team. They can market your podcast and
provide real and organic customers. JISON: …real and organic customers.
JACK: He says he’s promoted fifteen podcasts and charged $500 a month and says he has a
lot of repeat customers. If this is true, Jison has pulled in over $5,000 doing this.
That’s a lot for Dhaka. He goes on to tell me that he can deliver 1,000 new subscribers
a month which will be enough to get me in the Top 200. I asked Jison specifically how he gets
so many new subscribers. He tells me. JISON: Actually it’s a secret because…
JACK: He says it’s a secret because if he told me I wouldn’t need to hire promoters.
I ask him the burning question, the question nobody wants to tell me the answer to.
Where did you learn this from? JISON: Sir, in the past I learned from my boss.
He’s the best podcast promoter in my country. He’s not only my country, in the world I think,
because I love him so much. JACK: What’s his name?
JISON: MD Monowar, sir. JACK: Say again?
JISON: His name is MD Monowar, sir. JACK: MD Monowar.
Finally going up the chain. I drew a big question mark on an index card, wrote Monowar on it and
tacked it to my wall. I listened further. JISON: He’s the person from…
JACK: Monowar is the first person who discovered how iTunes podcast promotions worked.
After that he trains up young people. At this point everyone who learned about
podcast promotion learned it from him, so we’re in love with him so much.
JISON: Love him so much. JACK: Out of nowhere our Skype call drops but the
new card I just put on the wall, I remove it and I put it above all the others now, thinking this
might be the main guy, the one who started this whole thing and popularized this in Bangladesh.
MD Monowar. Maybe he has all the secrets, all the answers. Maybe he’d even teach me all the tactics.
I turned all my focus to finding him. Could I do it from the other side of the planet?
I barely have any information other than his name. Even if I did find him, would he tell me anything?
After the break we talk about books, we hear from Seth Godin.
SETH: Hey. JACK: And maybe Monowar. Maybe. [MUSIC]
I feel like I’m deep in this rabbit hole now so I decide to take a drive.
I head over to the bookstore and just start browsing around.
The first rack of books I saw was titled New York Times Bestseller List.
List; my eyes narrowed. You ever get so deep into something that everywhere you look you just
can’t stop seeing it? Or if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
I was now wondering is it possible to corrupt the New York Times Bestseller List? Right there in the
bookstore I got on Twitter and messaged Phil Stamper. Phil works for a big book publisher
in New York which gives him early access to the list but not only that, Phil is an up and coming
author so he’s glued to the [00:25:00] list, always watching what’s coming and going on it. I
asked him what it means to be on the list.