On October 9th 2010 the Geek News Central Podcast will be 6 years old. By the time that show airs, I will have produced 617 episodes of the show. I did some math tonight and was quite shocked on how many downloads we have had of the show! Geek News Central is well into the 8 digit territory.
I’ll be honest I was pretty shocked when I did the math. I have a pretty good handle on the numbers day to day, because I have been tracking the show stats with a variety of tools since about July of 2005 but honestly the total download number sat me back in my chair.
The first 9 months of tracking my show downloads are a little fuzzy, thus I had to do some fuzzy math to come up with the first 9 months download totals. At that time it was a challenge in just finding the bandwidth to deliver the show, let alone worry about counting the downloads. In the very very early days I was burning through 250 to 300 Gigabytes of traffic each show, and at the time the most affordable shared hosting account you could get only had 500gb of monthly traffic. In the early days going from 400 to 25,000 subscribers happened pretty quickly it has only been upwards from there.
If I include the 5 years of CES, and Special Events the number nearly triples. So we are going to have a little fun for the 6 year anniversary show. I will announce a new contest on the show tomorrow, tune in to find out how you can get a chance at a very cool prizes.
Here is the weird part I have not decided if I am going to announce the actual number because it brings out the dogs.
When I shared the total with a podcasting buddy tonight he was not surprised, but I had to do the math twice. Building this shows audience has not come easy, in the early days I had several subscriber setbacks, the week I announced my Podcasting book in May of 2005 my audience dropped in half overnight, when I took my first advertiser in June of 2005 the audience dropped again. The hate mail I got over the book deal and taking a sponsor was simply unbelievable. In the early days, I was accused of selling out. Most of the naysayers are gone, a few are still being naysayers but most have podfaded. With the show at 75 minutes it is definitively the upper limit for a one man show.
If I can say one thing, consistency has been the key in growing the audience. At this point doing the show is still of the highest priority to me, a lot of people get their twice weekly time shifted fix of tech news. I continue to experiment with the show in tiny increments, and while the Audio portion of the audience is my bread and butter and is what keeps the lights on and my family fed. The video subscriber numbers though are literally exploding. This is raising it’s own concerns as downloaded Video delivered as a podcast is very expensive to deliver. It cost about .07 cents per viewer to deliver the video portion of the show, and I understand now why some of the big boys have to have bandwidth sponsors for their shows.
“The Morning Tech Show” that I launched three weeks ago seems to be gaining speed, and is on target to meet my internal viewer goals. The goal remains to launch 5 more shows here at Geek News Central before the end of the year. I am still in solicitation mode at this point. There has to be some website changes as well to add more shows, so that has to be done yet, if you want to be tech star send me an email :) and an idea for a show your willing to commit to for 2 years.
If it has been a while since you tuned in, subscribe and pull down a couple of episodes to see where the show is going or watch me on your Roku or Boxee. Looking at my show Stats, this month so far GNC has reached listeners in 177 out of 194 countries with the bottom 3 only getting 1 download each. Not sure what to compare that to but I think it’s cool that I have a global audience.
We will have some fun on the anniversary show and give away some prizes. I want to thank all of the Ohana that have helped get us to this point in the shows development. Someday with a lot of work maybe we can say billions and billions served but that’s only a dream at this point.
Todd…