There's a common confusion between ratings and reviews. In short, you can often leave a star rating without a review, but Apple Podcasts (and some other platforms) require all reviews to include ratings.
Since launching in 2014, My Podcast Reviews has focused on showing your podcast reviews. But now, we track your ratings that don't have reviews!
Here's an example of how it looks on the website and in your email alerts:
- Global average rating: this is calculated from all your ratings and reviews from all countries and platforms we track for you.
- Ratings: this is your global total of ratings (1 to 5 stars), including ratings with reviews.
- Reviews: this is your global total of written reviews (with and without ratings).
- Platforms: this is the global total of how many platforms we track that have ratings or reviews for your podcast.
- Countries: this is the total number of countries from which you have ratings and reviews, from any platform.
To help you understand and gauge your engagement further, we're also introducing a new chart on the website:
The new chart will also let you see the comparison of your ratings and reviews—data you can't see anywhere else! Sure, Apple Podcasts shows a similar chart, but they don't let you see, for example, how many of your 5-star ratings also include written reviews. And, of course, we show your data from nearly 200 places!
This can help you better understand your engagement with your audience. You'll probably always have more ratings than reviews, but when you have nearly as many reviews as ratings (as the example shows for 5-star ratings), you know your audience is more engaged.
Plus, you can see (and now filter to) the number of reviews you have that don't include star ratings (currently, Castbox and Podchaser allow that).
And this is only the beginning for more and deeper information we'll be helping you to see and interact with in your My Podcast Reviews account!
In the “500+ club”?
Until now, we were limited to collecting no more than 500 historic reviews from a single country. But we've worked around that and now allow you to see all your reviews beyond the latest 500—even if you can't see them in Apple Podcasts anymore!
If you are in the “500+ club,” your podcast is one of a very, very small segment of popular podcasts. So congratulations!
Upcoming: a tool for getting more reviews
We're certainly not finished! Our next major feature release, coming very soon, will give you a smart and friendly tool you can use to directly help you get more podcast reviews—even if you don't have any, yet!
Thank you for using My Podcast Reviews! Please contact us with any questions or suggestions!
—Daniel J. Lewis