Jul 4, 2005
So for those of you who's interested, let me clue you in on the sad pathetic present of your favorite podcast and why It's becoming a bit of a struggle to keep my enthusiasm up about doing the show... I've been doing the show since late Feb 2005, and I've seen a slow but steady climb in listenership. However upon consulting with a few fellowpodcasters, I discovered that my #'s were rather obnoxiously low without cause. At the peak of my subcription level, I hit about 2000 listeners a month, whereas other podcasts who hadn't been around as long as mine were routinely getting 3 or 4 times that listenership a week. I couldn't quite fiqure out what to make of this for the longest time. Perhaps the kind of comedy I was doing was of no interest to all but a few people. Several times i thought of giving up, but I wasn't ready to give in just yet. Now, don't get me wrong; big #'s is not my primary reason for doing Tekdiff. I do this out of a love of audio storytelling, and because I enjoy entertainig people no matter how few they are... But, let me be honest, I've never been a roaring success at any of my creative endeavors, and even when I stuck with them I remained cloaked in total obscurity, not even able to get my friends to look/listen to my work when I handed them free copies. I've never known what it is about my personality that renders me forgettable, and i have learned that never is this dismissal personal, but there you are... I shout and no one pays attention. This podcast represents the closest thing to an actual tangible audience I've ever managed to hold sway over for any period of time, and even so It's been an uphill battle to get people to listen in (including my friends). My ray of hope in this scenario was the impending release of iTunes 4.9, which would expose my show to a whole new range of listeners, and would hopefully make the grind of the last 5 months of production seem even more worth it. But, as anyone who's checked iTunes has discovered, no Tekdiff in the directory. All right, I didn't thake it personally, but in my attempt to get my show listed with Apple's killer app, a shocking fact revealed itself to me... SInce I started Tekdiff, iPodder.org has been my primary listing space (though I have signed on with others) and as it turns out, the comedy directory at iPodder.org does not work with any of the iPodder programs except iPodderX. This means that only Mac OS X 10.2 or higher users running the paid for iPodder X shareware program could ever happen across my show by accident from within the aggregator. All mac iPodder users and ALL Windows users were prevented from accessing the list of comedy podcasts from their programs. They would have had to come across me some other way entirely. On top of that, it seems that iTunes uses the iPodder system to updated their listings and lo and behold! No comedy podcasts from iPodder made it if they were listed exclusively there. This means that my show was hobbled from it's inception, with almost no hope of finding an audience, and now, as podcast subscriptions soar, I remain totally unknown. Wait, it gets better. Not only is my fan base not increasing, it's actually contracting at a depressing rate. You see, it seems iPodder X users (where 90% of my listeners came from) have all upgreded to iTunes, and have not resubscribed to Tekdiff. I now have fewer listeners on a weekly basis than I did in the 1st 2 weeks of the show going online. So there you have it. 5 Months of fairly hard work producing a scripted, highly produced program and my reward is, well, nothing. Nada. Bupkus. Well, nothing Except for those of you wonderful listeners who enjoy my show each week. Thanks you so much from the botton of my sticky heart for those of you who listen in and vote and drop me the occasional line and give me a chance. It makes me feel like I'm having an impact and helps to dull the ache of realization that my show is possibly doomed to total obscurity forever. I promise I will continue to do Tekdiff until the ideas give out and my mind dies, which judging by my notes won't be for about 50 years. Keep tuning in, you guys are the tits! (Sorry if I sound a little maudlin here, I'm just a bit crabbed out about all this listing hoo-ha). -Cayenne