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"?
Weird wasn't in a negative sense, just as a qualitative descriptor of difference from what happens to the kind of English I hear every day. I am from Germany and I would probably find it difficult to listen to myself in an English language podcast due to my accent.
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).
Fair enough, but have you considered that an unfamiliar accent may give a podcast a unique personality for free?
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.
Totally agree. Getting good at podcasting takes a lot of practice. It's a lot harder than it may seem.
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.
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 !
Yep, my video podcast is Ping on Channel 9. Honestly, I don't have good metrics on it... and that drives a data guy like me nuts! :)
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.
Interesting on the 10-14 minute drop off point - I almost never watch technical you tube videos, and hardly ever listen to podcasts because of the time commitemtn vs not being sure what I will get (I used to be glued to Spolsky though I knew what I was getting)
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.
I agree. It depends on what type of podcast (genre) as well and how interesting it is(obviously). I subscribe to Joe Rogan's comedy podcast and ended purchasing stuff from his sponsors / his albums.
Yes they are very effective (when the content is good).
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.
Thank you (and thanks to everyone else who responded). I always considered podcasting as a way to keep existing users engaged rather than attracting new users. I have learned something from this thread. :)
It depends on the market, and varies a lot. This requires a lot of testing. I recommend you look into newsletter first. They are much easier to work with, measurable, and cheap to produce.
When it works, it's better than email. But that's only when it works.
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.
True, it's hard to track subscribers, etc. But like others have said, those subscribers are much more tuned in than say casual readers of your blog articles. Much higher level of trust with a podcast audience imo.
I love the metrics idea. A lot of people collect data, not many are doing anything with it. An easy way to turn collected data in to actionable items would be awesome.
This is something that I've been doing for clients for the last two years. I could do this job for you. It's something I really enjoy, and I'm familiar with a fair few analytics packages, GA, Mixpanel, Re-invigorate and so on. I also think I can pick new ones up pretty fast as the principles are more important than the technology.
Is there some way I can get in touch with you to discuss this further?
I do a lot of metric analysis for other companies. It's actually one of the ways that my company starts engagements and eventually leads to selling other services. We start by analyzing what data is already collected.
I love looking at data and now that I've seen dozens of Google Analytics properties and a handful of MixPanel/Flurry/Apsalar/misc. It's really easy for me to dive in and provide actionable recommendations.
Unfortunately, most sites don't have goals with conversion rates or Webmaster Tools (to see SEO) or have their eCommerce transactions hooked up. So it's a bit of a pain to try to teach a new business how to set that up. We're happy to do it for a small fee, but it takes time to get the clearance or work with the engineering team. Then it's a matter of waiting to collect that data (if we're talking startups or smaller businesses). Also, it seems to be a low margin business because many businesses already don't value their existing data so they aren't going to pay much to have someone collect even more data they won't look at.
However, when the data is collected, you can start making easier pitches. If we can increase your total revenue by X% we get Y% of it in the first year. If we don't, you don't pay us.
I'm happy to provide an initial consultation for free to anybody on Hacker News. If you find value in it, we can discuss on-going work.
Getting a cut of the revenue increase would be great, but how do you prove how much influence you've had on the revenue increase/decrease as compared to other steps the company took to change their fortunes? Are there any methods that can be used to tease apart each cause and effect?
Generally the businesses that we have pursued this path are ones who neglect to treat their online selling motions like a product.
For example, we are working with a client who makes "99%" of their money from physical retail. Their focus is on opening new physical locations and their eCommerce side is an after-thought. Their offline business is booming, but their online visits and conversion rates have been flat for 6+ months. My team will be taking over their site.
There is certainly a bit of faith that any change to visits will be from our SEO, though we can specifically target long-tail terms and build reports to show that they previously received X visits a month on these highly convertible terms now they receive 5X. However, with conversion rate optimization, the split-testing makes it pretty clear which changes performs better.
When the business gets an increase in highly convertible traffic after a flatline and additional $50,000-$500,000 in online revenue, they are very happy.
This type of contract only works with businesses that bring in millions. For smaller businesses or startups generating $50k-$100k/year, there are generally smaller budgets or not enough traffic to make split-testing possible in short-term engagements. So we'll do fixed bid consultations and short-term contracts for $1k-$20k and possibly do a follow up 3+ months down the line. Or we will use the split-testing and CRO service as a feeder to build trust in my team and then try to cross-sell our other service (build a custom mobile app, web app, or immersive advertisement).
thegrugq had a good idea. he recommended somebody should start a biz in making online disposable social media identities. this is easy to do but takes time. time is money so this could be a viable service though and with an easy python script could pump out identities automatically after amassing all your fake pictures.
you would pay them with bitcoins to create a whole online persona for you on facebook, twitter, linkedin ect that you would use as a backup in order to fool competitors, hackers, and govt authorities trying to track you down.
for instance your anonymous identity that publishes a democracy blog about china gives very subtle hints to this new fake online persona you've created, so when chinese authorities think they've found you they are in reality chasing nothing. kind of like when hackers sit together in a channel and if you log an entire month's worth, they start dropping personal information either purposely or accidentally by slipping up their opsec 'hey bro i went to that school too'.
only this time it leads to a maze of confusion instead to your front door like Jeremy Hammond.
could bundle this with other anonmity service like running a .onion newsgroup server for alt.binaries.messages retrieval
For those of you that hire video producers, how do you go about selecting who you work with?
Since I'm coming from a career as an audio and video engineer into the startup world, this would seem like an obvious area to do some freelancing, but it also seems like a chicken and egg problem with finding work and having demos/references.
A portfolio is a great first step. Doesn't have to be many projects. Just a few really impressive ones.
The good news is there are plenty of startups in need of videos. Offer to do a couple on the cheap to start your portfolio. Then start charging market rates.
If anyone here is looking for a "Startup Data/Metrics Analyst" as per the blog post, please get in touch. I've done this for companies here in the UK for the last two years, and I'm looking to expand this part of my work further. Happy to discuss working arrangements and deals, and am open to offers.
Please see my business card if you'd like to learn more about me: http://krmmalik.com/me
The metric analysis freelancer idea really spoke to me. Anyone with experience in this field have any suggestions for how one might break into this type of work? I'm always drawn to blog posts and the like that deal with metrics analysis but lack much real world experience. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Full Service Blogger sounds ever so slightly shady; like someone who would write pay-for-play stories and not care about the reputation they'd be burning.
I realize that's not the intent here, but it seems like that would be a natural equilibrium state for commercial writers.
I disagree. I think a case could be made for "brand ambassador" - blogging and social media management. While startup X is busy focusing on their core business, for $1,000 a month they could outsource some non-core functions like communicating with customers and writing interesting blog posts. They need someone to write three quality posts a week for them.
If you could pick up 10 clients for this, you're making $10,000 a month from home.
Big companies do this. Go to any large multi-national - take P&G for instance. Do you think the tweets for Tide detergent are done by P&G? Or do they have a social media marketing agency that works with them to ensure their customers and fans get responses? Of course, they work with an agency.
Why wouldn't a small company have an agency too? Priced right for them. Makes sense.
I think you're describing the majority of freelance blog writers you'll find on places like Elance, etc. these days.
What I meant was the blogger should deliver not only articles but all the other (very important) tasks for running an effective blog: editorial calendar, topic development, blogger outreach, etc. A premium blogging service, if you will.
As someone with a little experience and some modest success in this area, a good full-service blogger would be expensive. Not only because it requires a cluster of skills that are only tangentially related to each other and so are relatively rare to find together, but because a person who possesses these skills can build a good income for themselves will little investment aside from their own time. The opportunity cost of such a person selling their time is massive because they're exchanging long-run passive income for short-term work-for-hire income.
I'm hesitant to estimate how much such a service would reasonably cost without thinking about it some more, but I am very curious as to how much a startup in a position to benefit from this kind of outsourcing thinks they could reasonably pay.
I agree that a person who is competent and creative enough to write solid blog posts in a space that isn't his or her specialty is exceedingly rare. They often have their own ideas and projects.
Honestly, most guest bloggers and freelance writers may be affordable (or even cheap) but simply aren't that good. The writing is often bland or immature. Not content I would want representing my brand.
To get a creative and smart wordslinger to run your blog and manage your brand like that would be expensive.
I'll be honest. I never use podcasts. Is it really an effective channel for building an audience?