How does Most Voted Podcasts work?
Discover podcasts. Have your say. Shape the ranking.
Most Voted Podcasts is a community ranking for podcasts. What stands at the top is not decided by download figures, subscriptions or an algorithm, but by the votes of the people who listen.
Discovering podcasts
Browse the ranking, search for a particular show, or filter by language, category and publisher. You can switch between the all-time ranking and the votes of the current month, and sort the results by rank, title, number of episodes or latest episode.
Every show page gives you the key facts, the latest episodes and links to the common podcast players. Listening happens there – we are the recommendation, not the player.
Voting
Know a show? Then say what you think of it. Up arrow means: I would recommend this. Down arrow: I think this is overrated. That is all it takes.
We deliberately do without star ratings. Whether a podcast deserves 4.2 or 3.9 stars is of limited help when choosing. The more interesting question is: would you recommend this podcast?
One account, one vote
To keep voting fair, each account can vote once per show. If you change your mind later, you can change or withdraw your vote – the new rating replaces the previous one.
Voting requires a free account. Browsing Most Voted Podcasts works without signing in. Unusual voting patterns are reviewed; it is the same protection that applies to app votes.
How the order comes about
The voting score is the number of positive votes minus the negative ones. A show with 184 positive and 27 negative votes has a score of 157. The higher the score, the higher it ranks. If two shows have the same score, the one with more votes overall comes first; if those are equal too, alphabetical order decides.
Following the ranking live
Every vote can change the ranking. In LIVE mode you see new votes within seconds and can watch shows swap places. The result is not a static list but a ranking that keeps developing with the opinions of its community. If that feels too restless, simply switch LIVE off again.
Favourite podcast missing? Just add it.
Not every good show is listed yet. If yours is missing, you can suggest it: we look it up in a public podcast directory and take the title, description, artwork and episodes from its feed. After that you can vote straight away – the show appears immediately, and the "verified" mark is something our editors add later.
We refresh the feeds daily, so new episodes and changes arrive on their own. A show that publishes twice a week shows up here twice a week.
Monthly awards
Alongside the all-time ranking there is a new competition every month. In each category the most popular shows are honoured: first place gold, second silver, third bronze, places four to ten count as nominated. An award is decided by a show’s vote count at the end of the voting period – every vote it has collected up to that point. Below each count you can see how many of them came in during the competition month.
German and English shows compete separately, so the size of a language area does not decide who wins. Which language a show is in we take from its feed, not from our own judgement. All winners stay permanently visible in the award archive – an award does not expire when the month is over.
The jury's picks
Alongside the community there is an independent jury of journalists and people who work with podcasts professionally. They recommend shows that stood out to them – explicitly including ones hardly anyone knows yet.
The jury does not change the ranking. Jurors vote like everyone else; their recommendation is a personal text, not an extra or more heavily weighted vote.
Do you make a podcast yourself?
Then you can prove that a listed show belongs to you. There are three ways: a verification code in the RSS feed, your website, or a confirmation email to the address given in the feed.
Once verified, you maintain your show page yourself, can leave a note for your listeners and embed a widget with your current ranking on your own website. And of course your show takes part in the monthly awards. All of this is free.
What about sponsored placements?
Podcasts can book paid, particularly visible placements with us. They appear at a fixed position in the list and are clearly marked as advertising – without a rank and without voting arrows, so that nobody mistakes them for a position that was earned.
They have no influence on the ranking. The same show also appears at its real position in the list, and there you can vote it up or down as usual. Visibility can be booked. A place in the ranking cannot.
Join in
The more people vote, the better Most Voted Podcasts gets. A good recommendation should not depend on which show already has millions of listeners, or which one a platform happens to be promoting. It should depend on what people say after listening: you should hear this.
Discover podcasts. Vote. Change the ranking.
Who is behind this
Most Voted Podcasts is run by movo media, an independent software company based in Bonn, Germany. Founder Stephan Ehrmann has worked professionally with technology, software and digital products for more than 35 years – before that he was deputy editor-in-chief of c’t and the founder and editor-in-chief of Mac & i and heise download. As a technology expert he has been a regular guest of German media such as Tagesschau, ZDF and Deutschlandfunk.
We started with Most Voted Apps: the same idea, but for apps – a ranking built from votes instead of download figures. Most Voted Podcasts is the second vertical of the same platform. The technology, the voting rules and the protection against manipulation are identical; what is kept apart are the rankings, the awards and the jury's remits, because a show and an app should not have to compete with each other.