Now having data for most of October, knowing our release schedule, and being able to see month-by-month engagement, I’d actually forecast that 80k Podcast listening time should grow 15-20% this year (not 5%), for ~300,000 hours of consumption total.
(If you forecast that Q4 2023 will be the same as Q3 2023 then you get 11% growth, and in fact it’s going to come in higher.)
That is indeed still a significant reduction from last year when it grew ~40%.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss in more detail!
Does that figure adjust for number of episodes released? I imagine there are many people who listen to every episode, or who listen to every episode that they’re interested in. If that is the case, and because the podcast now has two hosts and seems to publish more content, the indicator may not be a useful proxy for EA growth this year (given the “number of episodes available” confounder).
Okay, I’ve now updated this metric in the post. For interested readers: this basically didn’t change the top level conclusions of the post (it changed the 2023 v 2022 mid funnel growth rate from 67% → 68%), even though the 80k podcast is a pretty big program.
Thanks Rob! Really glad to hear that the podcast is doing better than I had anticipated. I’m traveling today, but will plan to update the podcast forecast when I have a moment [edit: done].
I’m not planning to update forecasts across the board for projects though: the data is already outdated from Aug, and in general I wouldn’t assume that any of the individual 2023 forecasts are very resilient (I was more interested in the overall growth rates than in the numbers for any specific program) — most of my reasoning on specific forecasts should be in the footnotes if readers are interested.
For posterity, the 80K team helped me generate the 2023 end of year forecasts, and used the method detailed in FN 5, which I’ve included below for convenience (just to clarify, I believe the 80k team used this methodology to generate forecasts, but I wrote the description):
This and all of 80k’s 2023 projected metrics in this memo are found by calculating: [2022 total value] x ([2023 YTD value] / [2022 equivalent YTD value]).
For example, if we have 2023 YTD data for the total number of newsletter subscribers until Aug 1, 2023, we would calculate: [Total number of subscribers on Dec 31, 2022] x ( [Total number of subscribers on Aug 1, 2023] / [Total number of subscribers on Aug 1, 2022] ). This is to account for any seasonality effects.
Now having data for most of October, knowing our release schedule, and being able to see month-by-month engagement, I’d actually forecast that 80k Podcast listening time should grow 15-20% this year (not 5%), for ~300,000 hours of consumption total.
(If you forecast that Q4 2023 will be the same as Q3 2023 then you get 11% growth, and in fact it’s going to come in higher.)
That is indeed still a significant reduction from last year when it grew ~40%.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss in more detail!
Does that figure adjust for number of episodes released? I imagine there are many people who listen to every episode, or who listen to every episode that they’re interested in. If that is the case, and because the podcast now has two hosts and seems to publish more content, the indicator may not be a useful proxy for EA growth this year (given the “number of episodes available” confounder).
Okay, I’ve now updated this metric in the post. For interested readers: this basically didn’t change the top level conclusions of the post (it changed the 2023 v 2022 mid funnel growth rate from 67% → 68%), even though the 80k podcast is a pretty big program.
Thanks Rob! Really glad to hear that the podcast is doing better than I had anticipated. I’m traveling today, but will plan to update the podcast forecast when I have a moment [edit: done].
I’m not planning to update forecasts across the board for projects though: the data is already outdated from Aug, and in general I wouldn’t assume that any of the individual 2023 forecasts are very resilient (I was more interested in the overall growth rates than in the numbers for any specific program) — most of my reasoning on specific forecasts should be in the footnotes if readers are interested.
For posterity, the 80K team helped me generate the 2023 end of year forecasts, and used the method detailed in FN 5, which I’ve included below for convenience (just to clarify, I believe the 80k team used this methodology to generate forecasts, but I wrote the description):
I’ll make this clearer in the body of the post.