To be honest, I was surprised that my last post on the podcast awards garnered any sort of response. At least I know that some people do, in fact, read my blog.
In any case, someone from the awards posted a comment to my last post, and I thought I’d quote it on the front page:
While no Awards System is perfect it is the People’s Choice Podcast Awards thus those shows with higher nomination numbers do stand a better chance. But I can say without hesitation that their were shows that got a lot of nominations who graded low in the other criteria that caused the show to be edged out.
The people doing the grading are listeners and most worked as many as 20 hours on a single category so while we try to do the best we feel that the podcasters that have audiences that are engaged is very significant trait that podcasters can learn a lot from.
Good luck next year and again while nothing is perfect we do our best to make it fair.
As I said, I do have to give them credit to responding, even to a lowly little blog such as this one, and he does note that it is the People’s Choice awards and thus, obviously, those podcasts that the people like have a better chance of winning.
And I have no problem with this. I have nothing against “people choice” awards things in general (other than the fact that just because something is popular doesn’t mean it is of quality, but all awards decided by votes of the populace - from this, to the MTV People’s Choice Awards, to presidential elections - suffer from this flaw), my issue was with them saying that it was both simultaneously a people’s choice awards, and that everyone has an “equal chance” of winning at the same time.
Awards like the Oscar’s, for example, I would really see as being an “equal chance” type award because it doesn’t matter how much money a movie made or how many people saw it, or how wrote about it was, it still has a chance to win if it is a good movie.
On the other hand, clearly a movie like Paprika isn’t going to win an MTV People’s Choice Award, no matter how good it is, because no one but a small niche of people know about it and would vote on it.
That was my sticking point. The commenter also noted that there were shows with a lot of nominations that scored lowed and thus didn’t get nominated, but that doesn’t address my point, unless they got bumped out by a show with significantly fewer nominations. My point isn’t that shows with a lot of nominations will always get nominated - that is obviously not the case if you have, for example, 20 highly nominated shows with only 12 nomination spots - it’s that shows that don’t get a lot of nominations have little shot of getting nominated, even if they’re really good.
The one point that I may be able to agree with is the one that says that podcasters with not many listeners or with a lot of listeners, but ones that aren’t active, may be able to learn things from those which do have a lot of engaged listeners. I would tend to agree since, again, if they have that many viewers, they must be doing something right.
Ironically enough, the podcast that got me into podcasting is Anime Pulse, which won the Cultural/Arts award last year, and is up for it again, as well as the “People’s Choice” award this year.
But that argument goes back to what I reference yesterday: the idea that shows with more listeners are better than those with fewer listeners, and while this argument does have some logic to it, it isn’t a perfect argument.
Anime , when compared to most other TV shows and movies, is a great example. I think that while Hollywood and both network and cable TV languishes due to a lack of creativity, I find a lot of new and unique things coming out as anime all the time. However, it’s still a niche thing and, comparatively not many people watch it. But that doesn’t mean that what’s on TV is better, it’s just that people either don’t know about, or won’t give a chance to things like anime.
And finally he notes the time that evaluators spent reviewing the podcasts, and I appreciate that work and recognize how many nominations they have to sift through and how many podcasts they have to listen to, but it’s rather irrelevant to the point I was making.
I mean, I guess one can give them credit for making number of nominations 40%, meaning that no podcast is mathematically eliminated right off the bat before they’ve been evaluated, but 40% is still a hefty percentage, and creates a pretty big hill to climb for those podcasts with not many nominations. I’ve already done some of the math on this yesterday (assuming that their rating for number of nominations is proportional to the actual number of nominations received) and one can see how much influence that can have.
Just for the sake of humor, I kind of came up with my own weighting system, and my reasons behind it:
Number of Nominations - 10%
Actually, if it were up to me, I’d completely get rid of the number of nominations score when actually deciding on the nominations, but I’ll leave it here just to be nice. I guess one alternative would be to have some sort of negligible minimal nomination barrier like - 5 or 10 nominations - enough so that someone can’t get over it easily by just hopping on a few computers at the public library to nominate their own podcast, but is low enough that podcasts that aren’t necessarily known can still get over it.
Quality of Website Design - 10%
Down from 15% from what the awards use. As a website designer, it pains me to reduce the score that website design would take but, ultimately, while website design is nice an all, we’re judging podcasts, not the websites that host them.
Relevance of Content - 40%
This is twice what the awards has it. Why? Just like any form of entertainment or information, the single most important factor is what is actually in the darn thing. I find it rather interesting that a podcast could have a pile of poo for content and still score 80% under the current scoring metric (which is a lot better than a great podcast with few nominations would probably score).
Quality of Sound - 20%
Up 5% from what the Awards have them. This is a podcast. Sound is important.
Quality of Podcast Delivery and Show Format - 20%
Again, twice what the current awards system has it. Why? If the content is good, but the delivery of the content is crap, then that’s still bad (though not as bad as having a good delivery of crappy content).
So here, now ratings for things which I would consider to be actually relevant to a podcast go from a mere 50% to 80% of the nominating score. Now that wasn’t so hard now was it?
Updated Thought:
One more thing, the commenter made a note that they try their best to make the competition fair. However, fairness wasn’t what I was talking about, I was talking about the claim that everyone has an “equal chance,” and the two aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Fairness basically means that the process is unbiased - in other words, whatever process they have in place applies the same to everyone. This is true - no podcast, presumably, had it’s score inflated or deflated in comparison to another podcast for reasons that weren’t stated.
However, being fair doesn’t necessarily mean that every podcast is given an “equal chance,” and I’ve already explained why for the most part.
Look at it this way: consider the rules in each state regarding whether a presidential candidate can get on the ballot. Those laws are applied equally. If a candidate can’t get on the ballot because they can’t get enough signatures, that doesn’t mean that the law that prevents them from doing so is unfair. It’s there for a reason: to prevent frivolous candidates from crowding the ballot. However, that doesn’t mean that such a law doesn’t prevent everyone from having an “equal chance” of becoming President.
Of course, as I stated earlier, Presidential elections don’t give everyone an equal chance, and they don’t pretend to.
