Hello, my name’s Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as the head of marketing.
I’m interested in animal advocacy, moral circle expansion, and normative ethics.
Previously, I worked in community building with the Global Challenges Project and EA Oxford, and have interned at Charity Entrepreneurship.
Please feel free to email me to connect at bellaforristal@gmail.com, or leave anonymous feedback at https://www.admonymous.co/bellaforristal :)
Hey! I work at 80k doing outreach.
Thanks for your work here!
I think the data from 80k overall tells a bit of a different story.
Here’s a copy of our programmes’ lead metrics, and our main funnel metrics (more detailed).
As you can see, some metrics take a dip in Q1 and Q2 2023: site visitors & engagement time, new newsletter subscribers, podcast listening time, and applications to advising.
I’d like to say four things about that data:
It seems pretty plausible to me that lower interest in EA due to the FTX crash is one (important) factor driving those metrics that took a dip. That said:
All of those seem to have “bounced back” in Q3
Our website (and to some extent podcast) metrics are very heavily driven by how much outreach & marketing we do. In Q4 2022, we spent very little on marketing compared to the rest of 2022 & 2023, which I think is a significant contributor to the trend.
It looks like the second half of 2022 was just an unusually high-growth period (for 80k, and I think EA more broadly), and falling from that peak is not particularly surprising due to regression to the mean. Maintaining a level of growth that high might have been possible, but it would be historically very unusual.
To make a more general point, I think a number of the metrics you cite in the post show returning to levels from early 2022, or 2021, which (at least to me) doesn’t seem like ‘worrisome deterioration of EA activity’ but rather something more like ‘a return to a historically normal level of growth for EA.’