The IAB's Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines v2.1 are the closest thing the industry has to a global standard, and we apply them everywhere we can. They were also written with an assumption baked in that doesn't hold across a lot of our network: that a "download" reasonably approximates an intent-to-listen event on a always-connected device.
Where the standard strains
A large share of podcast consumption in our markets happens through offline-first apps, explicitly built so a user can download an episode once on Wi-Fi or cheap data and listen later without spending prepaid data on streaming. That's good product design for the market. It also means a single download can represent a genuine future listen, a listen that never happens, or — less charitably — a pre-fetch the app triggered automatically that the user never opens.
What we do about it
- We weight downloads against completion signals where the app can report them, rather than treating every download as an equivalent listen.
- We disclose methodology on every campaign report, rather than presenting a raw download count as if it were directly comparable to a Western streaming-based measurement.
- We're working directly with the offline-first apps in our network to get better in-app completion telemetry back to us, closing the gap over time rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
None of this means podcast is unmeasurable here — it means the measurement has to be honest about what a download actually represents in a prepaid-data, offline-first market. We'd rather report a defensible number than an inflated one that doesn't survive a second look.