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The Business of Podcasting with Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily

Episode #114

Jeff Meyerson (@the_prion) is the host of Software Engineering Daily, a popular podcast that averages 20,000 downloads a day. It's also a successful business that generates close to $60,000/month in advertising revenue. Jeff joined the show to talk about the business of podcasting: What goes into producing an episode? How do you ask great questions? What's the best way to grow your listenership and land lucrative advertising deals? And what lessons from podcasting apply more broadly to all indie hackers?

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    I enjoyed this conversation. The talk about the growth of the market, the difficulty of attracting ads, etc was fantastic.

    I'm definitely prefer the "higher insights per minute" kind of podcast Jeff mentioned. Conversations with Tyler is actually my absolute favorite, so I'll definitely check out the interview @JeffMeyerson mentioned doing with him!

    On books and audio books, I agree with Cortland that there are a lot of 200 page books that really should be 50 pages or even just a blog post. The solution for me is just to be pickier about what I read. One strategy I've found very effective for the effort is to mostly ignore new books. Books that have stood the test of time and lasted decades are far often worth the time.

    I'm not really a fan of audio books because they seem like the worst of both worlds. They're lengthy and listening is much slower than books, and they don't usually have the conversational aspect that podcasts do to make audio so worth it. (On a related note, it's fantastic that IH has trascripts of all these!)

    That said, Can't Hurt Me really sounds worth checking out. If only there were more hours in the day for reading, listening and learning...

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    Great podcast about podcasting! I know Jeff said that it was easier back in the day to get people to listen to his podcast, but was there any sort of marketing that he did? Or did it just spread mainly by word of mouth?

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        Not any good marketing. I am quite bad at marketing/social media management.

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    Where can I found stats about podcast's number of subscribers and average downloads per episode?

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      Doesn't exist publicly. You just have to ask podcast hosts and hope they share!

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        thanks for your answer.

        Considering that you have a successful podcast, have you any idea how the apple podcast charts work? From an outside perspective, it seems to me that they reward recent performance more than overall results, but I am not sure about it.

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          I don't really know, but after running a podcast for a couple years, I think the iTunes rankings are a bit overrated.

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            This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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          People speculate that it’s based on number of new subscribers in the past week.

          You can see a post about it here:
          https://chartable.com/blog/chartbreakers

          There’s also a DarkNet diaries episode about gaming the charts here:
          https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/

          There’s also an SE Daily episode here about the same topic with the host of DarkNet diaries:
          https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/02/27/fake-podcast-charts-with-jack-rhysider/

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            thanks for your reply.

            As I suspected, it is possible to game the system. I am working on a project that requires reliable stats. Right now they are basically impossible to find, maybe there is a business opportunity here, for someone able to aggregate the stats from all the platforms out there.