2 chapters across the catalog
Blueberry's internal efforts to combat ad fraud involve sophisticated filtering systems to block bots and illegitimate traffic, particularly from programmatic ad networks. Mike Dell reveals that Blueberry discontinued its credit-card-free trial because bad actors were using it to spin up fake podcasts and hit them with bot farms to collect ad revenue. The company now requires a credit card upfront to deter these fraudulent activities.
The podcast industry faces a growing scam where AI-generated episodes are paired with automated listening bots to steal advertising revenue. Unlike music streaming on Spotify, which uses first-party data, podcasting remains an open ecosystem vulnerable to fake downloads from home-based router botnets. While digital advertising has struggled with click fraud for decades, the scale of automated content creation presents a new challenge for industry metrics.
