Jeff Holmes: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s a very good work. The music in general is very good. Actually, a friend of mine was asking for some recommendations. I said, “Check these out.” All right, let’s see. One listener, Tom, emailed and just had a bunch of questions about demographics and analytics stuff, which I can answer. “How many people bail on episodes?” On average, people listen to about two-thirds of the episodes. When you aggregate everyone’s drop-off, on average people are listening to about two-thirds of the episode, which is pretty good. That’s been very stable for many years. “Delta between most popular and least popular episodes.” YouTube is changing this. Certainly, the algorithm drives virality or popularity more on YouTube than the podcast. If you just talk about audio downloads, the delta is not large. You might have a 20 percent or 30 percent difference in downloads in, say, the first week or first month, between Peter Thiel, who was number one this year, and the middle of the pack. And even at the bottom of the pack, it’s not much more of that. On YouTube, it can be 10 times as many downloads just because once you get caught up in the algorithm on YouTube, it sweeps you away. Right now, someone like Stephen Kotkin has 10 times the views of Paula Byrne just because Kotkin took off like wildfire, and not as many people are checking out Paula Byrne. “Success rate in getting potential guests to accept,” probably 80 percent. Implicitly, it’s the people we don’t ask, because we don’t have an in with them or we don’t know how to reach them, that would raise that failure rate higher. For the most part, when we actually get in touch with someone, they say yes. There are a few exceptions to that. Is it hopeless to try Magnus [Carlsen] again?…

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