A curator's Engagement Score is a measure of how active their audience is relative to other curators on SubmitHub. It is our attempt to create a "one size fits all" metric that encompasses the various types of curator profiles, including blogs, playlisters, radio stations and more.
History
In early 2020 we rolled out something called an "Influence Score" (recently renamed to "Engagement Score"). The idea was to create one measure whereby the various types of curators (YouTube, Spotify, blogs, etc.) could be compared to each other. While it's not an exact science, the score is intended to give each user a general indication of how much impact a share from that curator will have.
You can read the original announcement here.
Today (2023)
Since its launch, a few things have changed:
I've dived into some of the major updates below.
The problem
We realize that curators share different genres different ways.
Showing a single, static Engagement Score does not reflect that exposure may vary greatly depending on the genre that curator is sharing.
The solution
The "Engagement Score" for each curator is now broken down by genre.
[for curators]
The genre-specific number is shown to artists when they are choosing who to send a song to. We do not show them your overall engagement number. The only way to view that number is from a curator's profile.
[/for curators]
To do this, my code looks back at the last 90 days of history that curator has had with each genre - and where they have shared those songs, including shout-outs. I then calculate a score based on where they share those genre-specific songs, rather than their overall site-wide profile/stats. In the case of Spotify playlisters, it also highlights the playlists they typically share your genres to.
I managed to get this down to ~30,000 database entries and it updates pretty darn fast while you're doing your genre selection (we're talking milliseconds).
I'm hoping this change does a better job of setting submitter expectations. And it might even allow us to eliminate the dreaded shout-out at some point, because it means users wouldn't have false expectations of where their songs are going to be shared. The end goal is to be able to turn something like "they've done 5 proper shares and 25 shout-outs" into "they've shared 5 times to their blog and 25 times to a smaller playlist."
On the curator side we've slightly reduced the impact of periphery social media pages.
If these aren't the main platforms being shared to via SubmitHub for Curators, and while they're still important on the periphery, we found that they were sometimes skewing engagement scores the wrong direction. The biggest changes here will probably be noticed by curators with highly engaged TikTok accounts.
For years now I've been using two measures to estimate a website's engagement: 1) Alexa Rank; 2) Moz Domain Authority.
At the start of May 2022, Alexa Rank shut down. Confusingly, they were owned by Amazon... famous for "Alexa" the home assistant. It's probably not a coincidence the name and domain shut down.
Fortunately, SimilarWeb has jumped into the ring, offering a like-for-like service that ranks websites globally. The numbers are a little different, but frankly I trust them more than the Alexa numbers, which likely weren't being maintained.
To get an accurate genre-specific picture, we need to consider shout-outs, especially in the case of Spotify playlisters with multiple playlists. While technically these aren't "proper approvals," it's important to set artist expectations properly. If they're looking at a genre where there's a 95% chance of a shout-out, but only a 5% chance of a proper share, it's misleading to show them an engagement score based solely on the proper shares.
As of January 25th, 2023, a curator's overall Engagement Score has also been updated to weigh shout-outs.
For curators the "average engagement" is an important part of determining their price. For purposes of simple math, let's say you have two genres:
The average is *NOT* (6+10)/2 = 8.
The average is weighted according to how often you're sharing to each genres. So, (3/30)*10 + (27/30)*6= 6.4.
If you're looking to increase your overall average, share frequently to your more-engaged genres, or work to increase engagement in your less-engaged genres.