Duchess Meghan’s COAFF podcast is at the top of some – but not all – pod charts

Confessions of a Female Blogger: I think alliterative titles are cheeseball AND I do not understand how podcast charts work. To be fair, I don’t completely understand the math involved in ANY charts in the age of streaming. Musical charts make no sense to me either, all I know is that Taylor Swift has figured out the voodoo math to stay at #1 forever. Tell me the number of streams, for sure. That’s data I can understand, if you say “so-and-so’s podcast was streamed one million times in the first 48 hours.” But charts? Why is there such a wide discrepancy between “Duchess Meghan’s new podcast is #1 on Lemonada, top ten on Apple and not even the top 100 on Spotify?” That’s what we’re dealing with here, with Meghan’s Confessions of a Female Founder pod.

Meghan Markle’s new girl boss podcast was fourth in the Apple podcast charts, but failed to make the top 100 on Spotify, two years after an executive at the streaming giant called her and her husband, Prince Harry, “grifters.”

The Duchess of Sussex released the first episode of Confessions of a Female Founder on Tuesday, April 8, and it featured an interview with Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of dating app Bumble.

While the show soared into the top 10 on Apple, it failed to make the top 100 on Spotify and did not get a showing in the top 50 business podcasts.

[From Newsweek]

Again, these charts make no sense unless they’re solely about the platform people are using to listen to COAFF and even then, I don’t buy it. I think people probably did seek out COAFF on Spotify, just because people understand how to navigate Spotify and they already subscribe. It was easy for me to find COAFF on Spotify on the day COAFF dropped. So are COAFF’s numbers being suppressed at Spotify? Or do I just not understand how podcast charts are calculated?

Incidentally, I didn’t want to amplify yet another review-bombing involving Meghan, but that’s exactly what happened this week. The same people who were appalled and disgusted by a cooking/lifestyle show were magically appalled and disgusted by Meghan’s podcast. It’s almost like people are always going to scream, cry and throw up over every little thing Meghan does and says, to the point where it becomes white noise?