State of the show 2006
Howdy folks.
If you’re reading this, then you’re probably a listener of my show. If not, go check it out by clicking on the huge icon in the upper left of the page.
On to the meat.
I figured that since other members have blogs, and they seem to be popular, I should have one. What better way to start off than do a retrospective and where are we now post.
I’ll start off by giving a bit of where did we come from. It was NDK 2005, mid-September or so. Batou and Weltall and Tim and I were bitching about the lack of good Anime podcasts. I had seen a live recording of ASO radio at either Kunicon or NDK (I don’t remember) and wasn’t terribly impressed with them. Batou and I joked about doing our own, since we like to hear ourselves talk, and I’m a programmer and could handle the technical side of it.
Over the next month Batou and I met a few times, tossed around name ideas, and figured out what domains we could actually get. We had a number of ideas, but Anime Pulse was my first idea, and we could actually get that domain, so we ended up going with that.
I purchased the domain, and found a decent cheap hosting provider. I setup a basic blog, and Batou and I started discussing format. We setup a basic outline of how we wanted the shows to go (which is the same format as today). We determined our rating scale, and then sat down to record our first episode.
We had no equipment, so we used my USB mic from Karaoke Revolution and propped it up between two textbooks on the table, and huddled around it. I did the recording on my laptop with Audacity, and then we spent the next five hours or so trying the get it so the levels weren’t terrible.
The next episode was a catastrophe. Batou and I had the brilliant idea of each recording on our own laptops using headsets to try to get better levels. It would have been great except for the fact that Batou’s laptop recorded slightly slower, so when we put the streams together, he started lagged by about minute 10. This would have been manageable, except for the fact that my headset had picked him up lightly, which created the “devil echo” as it were. I banged my head against it for about two hours, and then Chigo came over and loaded it into Premiere and played with it for about three more hours, and we finally said “screw it” and posted it. At that point we said “this is ridiculous” and I ordered a mic and a compressor. Batou picked up a mixer and a pre-amp, and two weeks later, we were back. I was still spending about four to five hours editing, but the sound quality was much better.
During this time, I submitted our show to iTunes, and all of a sudden we started taking off. So we called up Michael “Piano Squall” Gluck and asked him for an interview. Chigo and I had been blessed with his music at Kunicon, and were in love. We had all his songs on our computers and cars. Michael agreed, and we had our first interview.
The setup was ugly, I was still working out the best way to record Skype, so we had two laptops, one recording to Audacity, and then one that we actually used to talk to Michael on. We conferenced in the other computer so it got both sides of the convo to record. It was a cludge, but it worked.
We decided we wanted a forum, so off I went and setup a forum. It started slow at first, and Batou and I together were more than enough to handle it. Then it got busier, so first I pulled in Chigo to help. Then it got busier still, so we tapped a member who had shown great maturity in dealing with people in the forums. Yep, you guessed it. It was Rangiku. A better addition to the team I could not have dreamed of. With Rangi and Chigo around, Batou and I could focus more on administrative stuff. Batou, well, worked a lot. I spent a month or so tracking down every possible podcast listing/directory and submitting our show to it. I also setup Feedburner and routed our feed there so I could track stats, with which I was obsessed.
By this time 2006 had rolled around, and Chigo had become a permanent part of the show. We were rolling along well, and growing every week. Onepixel from the forums, who works for a design studio, offered his services with designing a logo for us, and developed the logo we use now (I just finally got the trademark approval 10 months later). Then we discussed shirts. We looked around, but couldn’t find anything online that had reasonable prices and the design capabilities I was looking for. So we talked to Weltall. By this time he had his SpiderRock store up on Cafepress, but wasn’t happy with it. So we worked out a deal with him to sell our shirts, and in exchange, I setup his current store. (See a trend here with the programming bit?)
So now we had a blog, a forum, a store with t-shirts and a logo. Now all we needed was profit. We had Google Adsense for the first 4 months or so. And just when it started doing well, like $5-$8 a day in ad revenue, they kicked us out. Something about click fraud, which none of us committed. I spent the next 6 months both appealing the decision (with no luck) and trying to find a decent replacement. I tried a couple different companies, but nothing compared to Google. After a couple tries I finally got AP accepted for Yahoo’s adsense beta, which is what we currently use. It’s still nowhere near the revenue of Google (it takes 6 months to make what we made in 25 days at the end of Google), but it’s something. We also started asking for donations.
In March-ish we got contacted by this guy Adam who said he ran this site called theOtaku.com and that he loved the show, and wanted a podcast for his site, but didn’t have the time to do it himself. Would we be willing to do a short weekly show for him for no pay and some banner ad impressions? We discussed it and decided, why not? It sounded like fun, and could only improve our visibility. We settled on the weekly show, but we got to pimp AP at the end of each show. That’s almost reached 30 episodes, and seems to be quite popular, although I need to ask Adam what the stats look like.
In July we started to reach the concurrency limit of our host. We had reached the bandwidth capacity including shows back in January, and had to quickly shift all our media over to Libsyn, which was a great move. Downloads were slightly slower, but we didn’t have to pay for bandwidth, and they’ve got good stats and a decent interface. So in July I moved from standard shared hosting to a Virtual Private Server through StartLogic. It was quite a bit more expensive, but for getting our own linux box essentially, it was worth it. I could setup ftp, subdomains, email, etc.. myself. So I got everything ready for the change. When I actually changed over the DNS, we spent a few days sorting everything out, and then there was a major outage at the hosting center. So the site went down for like three days. I was, to say the least, outraged. So much for the 99.9% uptime guarantee. I went ballistic on their account people, and demanded my money back. They went all apologetic, and I ended up getting an additional month free tacked onto the end of the account as compensation for the downtime.
After that it went a good bit smoother. We got some actual advertising, Anime-wiki.org, DirectTV, etc.. but nothing for very long. That’s been the biggest fight. If Batou and I didn’t make decent money, we wouldn’t be able to have such a robust community. Although we do get donations, advertising, and most recently subscriptions, it’s still not enough to cover costs. It’s getting very close to covering monthly expenses, but we haven’t even touched the startup costs, or the convention costs.
All in all, I’m pleased with how the show has gone. We’ve grown pretty steadily, and people still like listening to us. That makes me happy. It hasn’t been all flowers and sunrises though. Things have happened, and as the front man, I have to deal with all of it. Like the Google thing, forum issues, IRC issues, spam issues, advertising issues. Plus I do all the recording, editing, posting of the episodes. But a lot of that is my choice too. I am a perfectionist, and I have a hard time trusting other people to do things that I think I can do “right”. So I can’t complain much.
So where are we? I think we’re close to getting a handle on costs, and are poised to grow the show to the next level. Look for great things in the next two years. I know this has been a long post, but if you read it all, thanks.
yay! i read it all >:D and it was cool and stuff, you should remark this as the history of ap
XD
anyway you should add in your next post how the two newest members have gotten on the team and maybe alttle on the new moderators on the forums
- coll1nam11Your welcome.
- Funny MuffinsSeeing into how you clock is very interesting it seems that while you have a very perfectionist approach to life you some time are forced to rely on others and that seems to bother you for some reason.
Humans aren’t best if left alone.
As for the podcast your doing pretty good in my eyes.
Google adds or not it will be costing you cash from your pocket.
While im not one to preach about costs with as i have to cover so very little i still think that if it is getting to you that much that you should take a break or something.
Over the past few months it seems that costs have grown very important to you more so than in the past. While i understand that you are growing that is just the cost of fame and popularity.
With the title of Best Cultural/Arts Podcast you have alot to live up to and i know that you may be under alot of stress because of it. However, remember this is your hobby. If you wanted this to stop you could make it do so, much to the hate of certain people whose names i will withhold.
Basically what im trying to say is simple:
Have fun with it.
Don’t let it get to you.
And keep the good stuff coming.
-Funny Muffins