Methodology
MPD shows one kind of thing: facts. Every figure on this site comes from a public source, collected legally, and presented without interpretation. Here is exactly how.
Where the data comes from
Rankings come directly from the official Apple Podcasts and Spotify APIs. No intermediary, no scraping, no third-party aggregator. First-party sources only. Podcast and episode details come from each podcast's own public RSS feed, as declared by its author. That's it. Two sources, both public, both legal.
Declared vs measured
MPD keeps a strict line between two kinds of data. Declared data is what the author or platform provides directly: category, title, description, episode count. Measured data is what MPD computes from those raw inputs: publication frequency, average episode duration, link counts, RSS health score. MPD never presents one as the other, and never mixes them.
No interpretation, no estimation
Every statistic is computed by deterministic rules from raw public data. MPD adds no editorial judgment and no subjective weighting. When a metric would require a subjective choice, it is not shipped until an objective method exists.
What you will never find here
One thing you'll never find here: listen counts or subscriber numbers. Nobody can actually know those except the hosts themselves. Everyone else is guessing. I've been able to verify this firsthand, both as a podcast creator and through my professional experience in the industry — the figures displayed by other platforms bear little relation to reality. So rather than show you a number I can't verify, I show nothing. That choice is the whole philosophy of MPD in one line.
Everything is verifiable
Every data point MPD displays can be traced back to its source. Some require effort — verifying ranking trends means analysing every episode of every show in a top 100, one by one. But the data is there, public, and the result will be the same. MPD doesn't ask you to trust it. It gives you the means to check.
Questions about a specific feature? See the About page for the full context, or get in touch.