Over the past few months, I’ve been really pleased to see the audience for Philosophy in Action Radio grow by leaps and bounds. Mostly, that’s thanks to promotion from BlogTalkRadio, as well as our Facebook advertising. Let me give you some nuts and bolts.
People listen to the show via one of three methods: (1) the live broadcast, (2) the archive on BlogTalkRadio, or (3) the high-quality archive hosted on Podbean. (That last is used by our web archive and RSS feeds.)
The Live Audience
My live audience regularly ranges from about 30 to 90 people. Interestingly, my live audience for my Sunday morning shows is almost always greater than for my Wednesday evening shows.
The BlogTalkRadio Archive
The number of people listening via BlogTalkRadio’s archive varies widely, depending on whether BlogTalkRadio promotes the show or not. Since July, when I figured out that I could ask BTR to promote my shows, each episode has averaged over 2600 listens. (That’s really pretty awesome!)
Each episode ranges from a few hundred listens to many thousands. These five shows have had over 5000 listens:
- 5510 listens: 26 August 2012 Q&A: Third Parties, Selfish Parenting, Bigotry, and More
- 5533 listens: 8 July 2012 Q&A: Psychic Powers, Office Politics, Freedom, and More
- 5620 listens: 9 September 2012 Q&A: Rape Fears, Family Conflict, Atheist Prayer, and More
- 8640 listens: 16 September 2012 Q&A: Judging Others, Chivalry, Blue Laws, and More
- 17790 listens: 8 July 2012 Q&A: Cloning, Hypocritical Allies, Beauty, and More
Here are my total live listens and downloads via BlogTalkRadio by month:
Although the audio quality of BlogTalkRadio isn’t fabulous, I’m thrilled to be using a platform that brings Philosophy in Action so many new listeners. That’s really helped me break far beyond my original mostly Objectivist audience.
The Podbean Archive
As a result of that promotion by BlogTalkRadio, as well as the Facebook ads I’ve been running for Philosophy in Action’s Facebook Page, I’ve seen big growth in my downloads from Podbean. (Again, that’s what serves our web archive and RSS feeds.)
Here’s the graph of my downloads per month for all time. (Click for the full-size image.)
The graph shows the downloads for all my podcasts, including my Explore Atlas Shrugged series and my podcasts on philosophy of religion. The orange arrow indicates October 31st 2010, when I broadcast my first live “Rationally Selfish Webcast.” The blue arrow indicates April 25th, 2012, when I began broadcasting my Wednesday evening Talk Radio Show. Shortly thereafter, in mid-May, I switched the Sunday Q&A to BlogTalkRadio.
Basically, you can see a ton of growth starting in March 2012. I’ve tripled my downloads since then, which makes me very, very happy. In fact, I’m soon to hit a milestone. My total downloads are 199,066 — meaning that I’m just a stone’s throw away from 200,000 download from Podbean!
Our Tip Jar
Alas, contributions to Philosophy in Action haven’t grown with that increase in audience. I have some changes that I want to make in order to encourage that, particularly offering special content to people who contribute. (Y’all deserve that!)
In the meantime, I hope that people interested in spreading rational ideas will be enthused enough about our increasing reach to support our efforts. Even a few dollars makes a difference in my capacity to further expand Philosophy in Action’s audience. So if you’ve been thinking of contributing, please don’t wait for another day: Contribute Now.
Also, my hearty thanks to everyone who has contributed, particularly to those of you who’ve created recurring monthly contributions. You’ve enabled Philosophy in Action to get this far. I’m so excited to see where we’ll go from here!
Share This Post
