Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don't think it's a reflection. The Benchmark episode was such a cool experience, but it's more niche. It's a venture capital firm versus Amazon. Everybody cares about Amazon. Exactly. There's also this chronological thing where every three or four episodes is our biggest episode ever. Not necessarily because the content is more interesting, but because when you find a podcast you like, you stick around. There is this cumulative effect when we drop a new episode. If we had dropped this in 2016, it would have gotten a couple of thousand listens. But because it's dropped on top of the entire base of people who are subscribed to Acquired, it's really meaningful. I thought Ben brought up this really interesting point, where he asserted, podcasts are great because they're really sticky, but they're terrible to grow. He basically said, I don't know how you would grow a podcast if you didn't also have a writing platform that was easily affordable, because podcasts are really hard to share. That explains the reason why no matter how hard we try, we've really never been able to more than double in any year, because podcasts are an inherently uninsurable mechanism. Unless there's something that happens, like you get feed dropped for free in an NPR podcast that brings you 100,000 new listeners right away, or we had NVIDIA part two, I think, got a large promotion in Spotify, that brought us a bunch of new listeners that were subscribed in Spotify. Spotify has been a great partner to us this year.…

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