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 