Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday.
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 182, published October 23, 2018.
Those wacky charts, week three. Buckle your seatbelts: We’re stretching this story out to another week. As the discourse around click farms and Apple chart manipulation continued to swell last week, a producer named John Perotti was contacted over LinkedIn by someone claiming to be a “podcast promoter” on Fiverr, the online freelance services marketplace. Perotti, who manages podcast production at WBUR for his day job, decided to run an experiment: He would follow up with the scammy offering, apply it to his now-defunct personal podcast feed, and tweet out his journey down the rabbit hole. (Shouts to Perotti for still actively checking his LinkedIn profile.)
John kindly agreed to write up the experiment for us, but before we…
