Here’s to episode 300! 🎉 Announcing an important change to the podcast
As we celebrate this milestone, we’re moving away from the video podcast to focus on audio
This week marks a significant milestone at Epicenter with the release of episode 300 tomorrow! We’re so excited to have made it this far and thankful to our audience for sticking with us throughout the years.
It’s astonishing that five and a half years after starting Epicenter as a hobby, we’ve interviewed over 300 of the brightest minds in the space, giving them the space to share their stories, their ideas, and their vision for the future of the ecosystem.
Our incredible team, of course, makes this all possible. Meher, Sunny, and Friederike all share the founding vision that Brian and I established early on: to learn from the people shaping our industry and share that knowledge with our audience.
Behind the scenes, Peta (Production Manager), Vedran (Audio Engineer), Shinoj (Designer), Anna (Accountant), and Amp (Marketing Intern), work to bring you the podcast every week.
So here’s to 300 episodes – we hope to see you again at 400, 500 and so on!
This week also marks a change affecting how some of you consume the podcast. Going forward, we will move away from video to focus on producing Epicenter as an audio podcast. We came to this decision after much consideration, and here, I will explain the reasons for this change. But first, let’s look back on some Epicenter history.
We started doing video as an experiment in 2014 on an episode with Tom Ding who was then working on Koinify, an early, pre-DAO, pre-ICO, project funding platform. In those days, the video was live-streamed on Google Hangouts, and some people would even join the call and ask questions live.
After some time, we moved to planned weekly releases with post-production and editing. The French video agency, and my former employer, VEV, created our cool morphing logo intro, which we revealed to the world in our interview with Andreas Antonopoulos.
Doing video has been a lot of fun, and it’s been a great differentiator for podcast. In the early days, I tried to package Epicenter as video-first, which was one of the reasons which pushed us to buy the domain Epicenter.tv. But with the experience of several years behind us, it’s become apparent that producing video puts more overhead on the podcast than it creates opportunities.
To put things in perspective, our average retention rate on YouTube is about 12 minutes, where audio plays reach 30 to 40 minutes on average. Also, video accounts for less than 10% of our total plays .That means only a small number of you use YouTube as their primary platform.
Meanwhile, producing video is fairly time consuming and resource-intensive.
- It requires participants to call-in from a suitable setting (i.e., clean background, good Internet connection, etc.) Removing these barriers will take strain off of scheduling, especially as many of us frequently travel.
- It’s difficult to be creative with the format as any change currently requires us to consider the video component.
- It’s particularly time-consuming to record video ads. Moving to audio-only will make it more worthwhile to sell shorter ad packages, which is something sponsors want. It also means we can rotate ads more often, so you don’t hear the same ones for 6 months at a time.
This change coincides with Google’s decision to discontinue their Hangouts on Air product, on which we rely. The replacement product does not offer the features required to continue video production without introducing additional constraints.
We’re sad to say goodbye to video, but I sincerely believe that focussing on audio will allow us to create a much better podcast overall. And we’re totally opened to experimenting with video in the future for things where the format is relevant to the content.
For those of you who subscribe and listen on YouTube, you’re not flat out of luck. We’ll keep posting the audio there, and you’ll still receive subscription updates and notifications. You just won’t see our pretty faces anymore.
Of course, you can also subscribe and listen on all the major podcast platforms: iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.
As always, if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to reach out to us on our website, or on Twitter.
