Ok, this was a spur of the moment thing to put the Podcast Awards link on my website, and I knew I had basically 0% chance of getting nominated, much less winning, and I thought I’d wait until official nominations were made before I wrote about this.
When I was looking over their website, I kinda thought that the Podcast Awards have two rather contradictory statements about their awards.
First off, the first sentence - the very first sentence - of the About page says this:
We have taken great care in the design and launching of this site to give all podcasters an equal chance in the opportunity to win a People’s Choice Podcasting Award in their specific category.
Yet, everything is done by popular vote. Heck, look at how they score submitted podcasts from the Rules page:
Number of Nominations 40%
Quality of Website Design 15%
Quality of Sound 15%
Quality of Podcast Delivery and Show Format 10%
Relevance of Content 20%
This means that a podcast that sucks by any and all objective and measurable metrics, if really popular, still has a good chance of getting nominated over a very well made, yet not very well known podcast. How is that “giving an equal chance” in any sense of the phrase? You’re giving an equal chance - as long as they have a lot of visitors that can submit them for nomination.
If Podcast A has 1000 listeners and Podcast B has 100 listeners, and Podcast B gets 100% of all of the objective ratings, they’d presumably get a score of 64% - assuming that 1000 listeners garners a full “number of nominations” score. This means that Podcast A would need to garner only 15% - or an average of 25% of each objective metric, to beat them out.
Think about that, a podcast which has only a quarter of the website design, sound, delivery and format, and relevance of content as the less popular podcast could still get nominated over it, by the mere fact that people nominate it.
Now, I know there is an argument that can be made that if there are enough people willing to nominate it, it can’t be that bad, but you’re still screwing podcasts which aren’t well known but perhaps a lot better made.
Again, I’m not saying that my podcast was worthy of being nominated, but it could have been, and if it were, and it wasn’t nominated because not many people listen to it, then I would hardly find this competition as giving an “equal chance” to all podcasters.
If they truly want to give podcasts an “equal chance,” then they wouldn’t consider number of nominations at all when determining who they should nominate. I have no problem with voting on the nominations once they’re already made, but I think having people vote on the nominations to begin with is silly. Why even bother with nominations if people are going to choose everything anyway. Do they ever have a winner of a group with didn’t get the most nominations for that group?
This is the Otakon Day 2 Report. Once again, sorry for being slow putting this up. I really, really, really think the day 3 wrap-up will be up by tomorrow.
