"A podcast is a very effective channel for building an audience and building exposure for your company. "
I'll be honest. I never use podcasts. Is it really an effective channel for building an audience?
I'll be honest. I never use podcasts. Is it really an effective channel for building an audience?
* It has helped me connect with people in the press
* I occasionally get free passes to conferences and events
* It helps me land speaking gigs
* I can generally drive 300-1000 visits to a site, if it is relevant to the audience
30,000 views of a video sounds huge - can I ask how you grew it ? What was the off the bat number - ie was being part of a big channel just land big numbers ? Did you link from a popular article? Interested for the obvious reasons - and will have a watch when off iOS !
I do think the majority of the traffic is driven by it being featured on the home page of the Channel 9 developer network every Monday. I also think a lot of people subscribe to it through their Windows Phones (primarily Microsoft developer audience). You can find it on iTunes, but not sure if we have metrics for that.
We actually discussed some of the C9 metrics in the comments on a recent episode. Dan, the senior director of Channel 9, provided some good insight. We compared C9 to tech videos on YouTube and Vimeo. You can see the discussion here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/PingShow/Ping-160-Sinofsky-WP...
Re: growth over time That's tough to measure because the positioning of Channel 9 and the show has changed over time. When the show first started, they collapsed Channel 8 (academic) and Channel 10 (cool tech) into Channel 9 (developer). So there were some episodes with 90,000+ views and there was a lot of confusion and sudden drop in viewership. A lot of the confusion was that Ping was one of the least technical shows on this historically purely developer network. The viewers initially revolted and said this shouldn't belong on Channel 9.
I did some snapshot-based analytics by screen-scraping the Channel 9 page every hour or so to see how each episode would compare in its initial two days... IIRC, the shows that were around 10-14 minutes would have ~30% more views than shows over 15 minutes. But that was too short to go into depth on anything. We weren't reading perfectly worded scripts from teleprompters, so our 10-14 minutes was not very dense. I thought that a very short, non-informative, not incredibly funny podcast wasn't that valuable. So we could game the system and try to get a high view count with short episodes or try to get better content and more engagement with a lower view count.
Fast forward to today... we're now in our 166th episode. We are consistently getting 30,000+ views on 20+ minute episodes which is lower views than what we have had, but we seem to have much better engagement. The viewers seem to appreciate our light-heartedness and our running gags/inside jokes while bringing interesting angles to tech news. I'm happy to see the amount of substantial and thought-out comments that we are getting is also improving.
If you do start watching, would love to hear what a fresh pair of eyes thinks. Always looking to get feedback. Would love to be the next shanselman many years down the road.
I think of all online publishing media, podcasts are the hardest to execute well, harder than blogs, and harder than video. This might not be true for everyone, but while I can tolerate shitty writing and shitty video editing, I just can't stand bad audio production. Bad speaking, weird accents, breathing sounds, "uhm", each of those steal divert my attention from the content.
If you decide to start a podcast, please get some professional production help. One podcast I found that is not produced by NPR but still doing a good job (as well as being relevant to the HN crowd) is "This Developer's Life" (http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com).
Where are you from and what do you think is "normal". I'm an Australian (currently living in America) who has traveled a lot, I have a lot of friends from all over the world. I've never considered any one of them to have a "weird accent".
Can you give me examples of podcasts which you've found difficult to listen to due to "weird accents"?
What sounds familiar and what strange or plain wrong is probably highly personal. For example, I've heard enough Australians speak to have a feel for that particular variant of English. When I hear it, I notice the different "melody" of it, but there usually isn't a sound that surprises me or comes unexpected. It's like when I go into the Biotech building on our university campus: They have a weird floor layout and the main staircase isn't anywhere near the main door, but I find my way around because I got used to it.
However, when I had just moved to London as a freshman and first heard my Australian professor speak, every other word seemed out of place. That was just like my first trip to the Biotech building where the simple process of walking through the corridors was constantly interrupted by doors covered 100% in hazard signs and trying to remember the turns I took. Sure I could understand the Australian professor just like I could find my way around the Biotech building back then. But it took more energy than listening to a well produced radio program or walking around the building I work in every day.
In a podcast, ideally you'd want a speaker whose voice sounds natural and familiar so that their words convert into thoughts effortlessly, yet there are so many different ways to speak. This is a problem you have to deal with as a podcast producer that writers rarely have (except when writing about aluminum/aluminium).
That may require extra cognitive effort for the listener, but it is possible that it could lead to better retention in the long term. Just speculating.
Writing the topics and talking points — and sticking to them — is also a tricky task. In my first podcast series, we tended to ramble off-topic making for some pretty boring segments.
Most podcasts will probably never get a huge audience. But the audience you do get is a motivated, probably very specific one. That's a valuable audience.
The podcast listener-host relationship is much more intimate than the blog reader-writer relationship. They connect with the personality. Better medium to build trust than writing articles.
It's really had to handle the mechanics of subscribing someone and you can forget about strong analytics because you don't control the subscription process. After a customer hits your ITunes subscribe link, you're done. There's little you can figure out in terms of whether or not they subscribed.