Small Grants: Noun O' Talk podcast production

Following a successful trial, here is an updated proposal from @brileigh and myself for the production of Noun O’ Talk hosted by @cdt.eth.

TLDR;

1.25 - 1.75 ETH per episode to fund the ongoing production, editing, and distribution of the Noun O’ Talk podcast including YouTube videos. Payable every three (3) episodes completed.

  • 1.25 ETH per episode up to 1h45min of recording time
  • 1.75 ETH per episode longer than 1h45min of recording time

After discussing with cdt, we are also proposing to remaster episodes 1-19 in order to achieve the same level of production quality as recent episodes, in addition to distribution to YouTube for better visibility.

Same rates as above, payable every three (3) episodes completed.

WHO

⌐◨-◨ Matthew and Brileigh are Nouns enthusiasts who have co-hosted and produced podcasts for Juicebox DAO and RAW DAO. Past Nounish guests for The Juicecast have included dropnerd from SharkDAO and Kenbot from StudioDAO. They have also produced Web3 Galaxy Brain and Solidity Galaxy Brain hosted by nnnnicholas.

Matthew and Brileigh have been consistently producing and distributing the Noun O’ Talk podcast since September. Episodes produced and released so far include:

  • The Nouns Terminal with Hab & W1nt3r
  • Builder Reputation, DAO Coordination, and On-Chain Identity with Brian Flynn
  • Nouns Ex-Machina: AI Governance with The Hero Shep & Honk Diddly
  • Roko: The First A.I. DAO Member

WHAT

Since taking on the role of producers of Noun O’ Talk, Matthew and Brileigh have helped make the following improvements to the podcast:

  • Local, uncompressed recordings using Riverside instead of Zoom
  • Improvements to cdt’s recording environment and mic technique to reduce echo
  • Editing filler words and dead air from episodes, making guests sound better and saving time

For comparison, listen to interview audio and intro in episode 23 vs. episode 19

  • YouTube videos with custom 4k UHD waveform visualizations to cross-post and greatly increase searchability of episodes

ep23 visualizer

  • Embedded chapter markers for easy navigation in supported players (e.g. Apple Podcasts, Overcast)

  • Comprehensive show notes including timestamps, topics discussed, and relevant links

HOW

Here is an overview of the tasks involved with producing each episode of Noun O’ Talk.

Editing

  1. Automated removal of silence and dead air

  2. Manually removing filler words (”umm,” “like,” “you know,” etc.)

  3. Manually removing redundant or repetitive comments, phrasing, etc.

Processing

  1. For noisy guest audio (e.g. background hum, street noises), cleanup with iZotope RX 9

  2. Add a noise gate to each track to help separate dialogue from background noise

  3. Add a volume leveler for each track to ensure that voices don’t trail off or get too loud

  4. Compress each track to lower the loudest peaks and make the episode more even and listenable

  5. De-ess each track to reduce sibilance and “s” sounds

  6. Add resonance suppressor as needed to reduce harshness

  7. Match loudness for each track to streaming standard -16 LUFS (stereo)

Assembly

  1. Add music, intro, and outro

  2. Add keyframes to fade music in/out as needed

  3. Create chapter markers and embed them in metadata for easy navigation in supported players

  4. Export in .mp3 for distribution via CoHost

Distribution

  1. Write and format show notes: episode summary, timestamps, topics discussed, relevant links, and credits

  2. Upload files to CoHost for distribution to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. via RSS

YouTube videos

  1. Export full episode and selected clips as individual uncompressed audio tracks

  2. Create graphic for episode with show title, guest(s), cover art, etc.

  3. Create 4k UHD waveform visualizer in After Effects responding to each speaker

  4. Render full episode and clips (~4hr per episode)

  5. Format show notes to adhere to YouTube standards: episode summary, timestamps, topics discussed, relevant links, and credits

  6. Publish full episode and clips to Noun O’ Talk YouTube channel

WHY

Noun O’ Talk is the OG Nouns podcast with the most episodes and highest quality content. @cdt.eth regularly interviews a range of notable guests from the Nouns community and web3 more broadly, bringing visibility to Nouns and leveraging guests’ network effect. Small grants should continue to fund the production of Noun O’ Talk to enable cdt to focus on his main work while increasing the production quality, visibility, and reach of the podcast.

2 Likes

I’ve gotten to listen to a few of the episodes, and I just wanted to pop in and say, I think you are putting a really nice product out! I especially liked the additional of Youtube to the lineup and I’d love to see the rest of episodes migrate there. You may want to look into Odysee as well. It’s a decentralized version of Youtube. You used to be able to make an account and it would automatically port over your new uploads to their platform so you always have a backup if YT ever gets really wonky.

Keep up the great work!

1 Like

Really appreciate this message, Andrew!

@brileigh and I definitely can’t take all the credit, @cdt.eth is a fantastic host… we have the easy part :sunglasses:

We’ll look into Odysee for sure, appreciate the recommendation.

these podcasts have been great, and NSFW has excitedly supported them in the past, so it’s natural for us to support them going forward. i’ll talk to the group about new episodes + your proposal for remastering old episodes as well

1 Like

i’m a fan of the podcast and increased production, but how much engagement do previous episodes currently get? it’s not clear to me that spending 23+ ETH to remaster old episodes is worth it

are additional things happening on these new episodes vs. the ones done in the trial that contributed to the USD price per episode increase?

2 Likes

i’m a fan of the podcast and increased production, but how much engagement do previous episodes currently get? it’s not clear to me that spending 23+ ETH to remaster old episodes is worth it

Three of the top five episodes by total downloads are ep18 (4156), ep19 (Vapeape), and ep12 (Gnars DAO and Lil Nouns DAO). It’s not possible to pull the data on when specific episodes are downloaded, and of course there is a spike when each episode is released, but it stands to reason that listeners who like the pod will listen to previous episodes if they are interested in the guest(s). And more broadly, we are creating content that is a reference for anyone wants to learn about a topic that is discussed on a particular episode.

There are two main advantages to reworking past episodes: 1) cross-posting to YouTube for better searchability 2) removing dead air, pauses, etc. to make sure that it’s listenable.

To the first point, the idea is that when someone searches “4156 nouns,” “Nouns esports,” or “Vapeape” they can easily find the podcast and related clips. In other words, we can use the network effect of each guest to bring more eyes to the pod e.g. Brian Flynn from RabbitHole will attract a totally different crowd than Honk & Shep talking about AI. YouTube clips are also way easier to find via search engines than podcast episodes and can be easily viewed in-browser.

To the second point, if you listen to past episodes, particularly those from the Twitter space era, the difference is quite jarring and there is a ton of dead air, umms, uhhhhs, etc. So even if listeners go back to old episodes, they may not listen to the entire episode. Here are a couple examples of how much gets removed from the average episode:

  • ep21 Nouns Ex Machina: raw recording 2h5m —> edited to 1h34m
  • ep22 Builder Reputation: raw recording 1h36m —> edited to 1h14m
  • ep23 The Nouns Terminal: raw recording 1h28m —> edited to 1h5m

are additional things happening on these new episodes vs. the ones done in the trial that contributed to the USD price per episode increase?

There are two factors at play here: 1) ETH price action 2) increased workload, mostly due to the YouTube visualizers. After editing a few episodes, it also felt appropriate to have a “normal” episode rate and a “long” episode rate since it takes much longer to edit a 2hr episode vs. a 1hr episode.

We were initially asked for a quote by cdt mid-August when ETH was in the $1700-1900 USD range, so 0.75 ETH per episode worked out to $1300-1400 USD. The base rate proposed above (1.25 ETH) is now equal to ~ $1650 USD but also includes the added work of creating YouTube visualizers for whole episodes and clips as well as embedded chapter markers. As a proof-of-concept, we made YouTube visualizers and embedded chapter markers for episodes 20-23 but this wasn’t part of our initial proposal. Producing the podcast is labour intensive and we think that the new rates are reasonable while respecting our time as well.

Hope this helps clear up a few points, happy to answer more questions if you have them :slight_smile:

i think for 23+ ETH to remaster old episodes, that should go to an on chain proposal instead of NSFW… and if you’re going to do that maybe tack on some ETH for like another 5+ episodes. happy to put it on chain if you need

2 Likes

I think the quality of your work is amazing, but I don’t think the podcast is at such a level that justifies spending this much on audio editing.
This would be a no from me both via nsfw or onchain.

2 Likes

Thank you for the feedback @noun22 and @maty!

Our main priority is that pod production is funded going forward at the rates described above so that @cdt.eth can focus on his main work and episodes are released on a consistent basis. Once we’re clear on whether NSFW will fund production going forward, then we can figure out whether remastering past episodes makes sense or not.

As for the latter, we’re definitely not proposing 23+ ETH upfront to remaster past episodes. All work proposed above, including past episodes, would be payable every three episodes completed. A reasonable compromise might be to remaster at least ep18 (4156) and ep19 (vapeape) since they are the #1 and #2 most popular episodes, respectively.

We would fund the stuff going forward, I think you should consider an on chain proposal for all the backdated work

We should also set a USD rate for this instead of ETH, given your proposed change to the ETH rate in response to volatility. Let me know what you think is fair

1 Like

Thank you @noun22! We’ll discuss with @cdt.eth re: an on-chain proposal for the backlog episodes.

In terms of a USD rate for the work going forward, we were thinking 1700.00 USD (“normal” episode <1h45m) and 2300.00 USD (“long” episode >1h45m).