I’d like to encourage others to also narrate/record forum posts. Any takers?
I have quite a good mic which I use for the Sentience Institute podcast, and would probably be willing to record myself reading a few posts, if there is no urgent deadline.
Feedback welcome, of course. Worth continuing?
One relevant data point is from Animal Advocacy Careers’ experience.
We have a number of “skills profiles” which discuss career paths people could pursue. We have offered each of these in three formats: a detailed version with longer text and citations, a short version in a slightly more casual style, and an audio version (me reading out the brief version). We’ve found that the brief versions are most popular and the audio versions least popular, by quite a long way.
For example, in the first month we launched them (July 2020), across the 3 different profiles, the detailed versions averaged 62% the number of downloads as the short versions, and the audio versions averaged 6% of the number of downloads of the short versions.
(Caveat that the accessibility of the audio versions wasn’t great when we first launched, but I’ve improved it since then and the audio versions are still far less popular than the written versions.)
So there might be a little less interest than you expect? You could also ask 80k about how many listens the articles that they read aloud on the podcast get relative to (1) other podcast episodes, (2) page views on the articles. They’ve only done a handful, and not for a while, so I’d guess the numbers were low. (I’d be interested in their answer though, as I’ve considered doing the same with the SI podcast.)
[Edit, I just realised that you’ve literally already done this, so feel free to ignore the below]
However, it’s worth noting that it might be possible to turn the audio into a podcast and reach a new audience, in addition to providing the additional format for regular readers of the Forum. If you’ve already recorded the audio, it’s not much more effort to add some sort of short, standardised intro+outro, and maybe create a free website (e.g. using Wordpress’ basic version) where each time you just post a link to the episode and a link to the original forum post.
For the SI podcast, we use Buzzsprout as the hosting platform, which disseminates your content to all the usual podcast streaming services for $12 per month. Under that plan, you can upload up to 3 hours of audio per month, or pay $4 per extra hour. This seems like a very small amount if it’s a useful service.
So far the episodes I recorded have about 15-20 listens each (although not sure how many listened to the ‘whole thing’ vs a curious snip).
Seems decent as I haven’t promoted it much yet. Probably worth continuing but not yet worth investing a lot in production value… until the listenership goes say, over 100 per episode.
For example, in the first month we launched them (July 2020), across the 3 different profiles, the detailed versions averaged 62% the number of downloads as the short versions, and the audio versions averaged 6% of the number of downloads of the short versions.
This changes my estimate of how useful the EA forum podcast will be, so thanks for sharing your experience.
One important difference is that the EA forum is a continuous stream and people probably mostly read posts by the frontpage feed, rather than looking directly for information (which is probably more the case for the skills profiles)
I’m keen on the idea in principle.
I have quite a good mic which I use for the Sentience Institute podcast, and would probably be willing to record myself reading a few posts, if there is no urgent deadline.
One relevant data point is from Animal Advocacy Careers’ experience.
We have a number of “skills profiles” which discuss career paths people could pursue. We have offered each of these in three formats: a detailed version with longer text and citations, a short version in a slightly more casual style, and an audio version (me reading out the brief version). We’ve found that the brief versions are most popular and the audio versions least popular, by quite a long way.
For example, in the first month we launched them (July 2020), across the 3 different profiles, the detailed versions averaged 62% the number of downloads as the short versions, and the audio versions averaged 6% of the number of downloads of the short versions.
(Caveat that the accessibility of the audio versions wasn’t great when we first launched, but I’ve improved it since then and the audio versions are still far less popular than the written versions.)
So there might be a little less interest than you expect? You could also ask 80k about how many listens the articles that they read aloud on the podcast get relative to (1) other podcast episodes, (2) page views on the articles. They’ve only done a handful, and not for a while, so I’d guess the numbers were low. (I’d be interested in their answer though, as I’ve considered doing the same with the SI podcast.)
[Edit, I just realised that you’ve literally already done this, so feel free to ignore the below]
However, it’s worth noting that it might be possible to turn the audio into a podcast and reach a new audience, in addition to providing the additional format for regular readers of the Forum. If you’ve already recorded the audio, it’s not much more effort to add some sort of short, standardised intro+outro, and maybe create a free website (e.g. using Wordpress’ basic version) where each time you just post a link to the episode and a link to the original forum post.
For the SI podcast, we use Buzzsprout as the hosting platform, which disseminates your content to all the usual podcast streaming services for $12 per month. Under that plan, you can upload up to 3 hours of audio per month, or pay $4 per extra hour. This seems like a very small amount if it’s a useful service.
So far the episodes I recorded have about 15-20 listens each (although not sure how many listened to the ‘whole thing’ vs a curious snip).
Seems decent as I haven’t promoted it much yet. Probably worth continuing but not yet worth investing a lot in production value… until the listenership goes say, over 100 per episode.
What are the base rate numbers here?
This changes my estimate of how useful the EA forum podcast will be, so thanks for sharing your experience.
One important difference is that the EA forum is a continuous stream and people probably mostly read posts by the frontpage feed, rather than looking directly for information (which is probably more the case for the skills profiles)