There was a whole thing where Apple tweaked their default podcast app and it killed download numbers. Originally, when you subscribe to a show, it would download the last 5 episodes. Now, you need to manually download anything to hear it. Since most people subscribe to a show and only listen to an episode or two, it reaped havoc with podcast sponsors when they realized they'd been paying for 5x the number of listens they actually got.
That shouldn't affect the number of boosts, though, since that already requires a manual action and should be completely divorced from the empty downloads problem.
There was a whole thing where Apple tweaked their default podcast app and it killed download numbers. Originally, when you subscribe to a show, it would download the last 5 episodes. Now, you need to manually download anything to hear it. Since most people subscribe to a show and only listen to an episode or two, it reaped havoc with podcast sponsors when they realized they'd been paying for 5x the number of listens they actually got.
That shouldn't affect the number of boosts, though, since that already requires a manual action and should be completely divorced from the empty downloads problem.