Months ago, a company called Deepsee published an exposé of a traffic and audience generation strategy called “reward traffic.” The piece was picked up by Bloomberg just this week.

Their research alleges that companies like iHeart have been juicing their podcast rankings by purchasing “rewarded” downloads from an ad network called Jun Group. In Deepsee’s thoroughly documented report, they found multiple iHeart URLs used as creative and traffic landing pages such as:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-bloomberg-surveillance-30972795/episode/surveillance-market-timing-with-bitterly-podcast-98773848/

It does not appear that iHeart was alone in these allegations. There are many publishers trading and buying this traffic. A-L-L-E-G-E-D-L-Y

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