Episode 1000!

Podcast Transcript

2 years, nine months, and one day ago, I sat down and recorded the first episode of a daily podcast.

Today, I’m recording episode 1000.

It has been a lot of work, but it has been a great experience, and to date, hundreds of thousands of people from almost every country on Earth have listened to the show.

Join me as I celebrate the milestone of episode number 1000 of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before I get into the celebration, I’d like to give a few statistics about podcasts that you might not be aware of.

The first is that of all podcasts which have published a single episode onto an RSS feed, twenty-five percent have only published a single episode.

If you ever hear about there being millions of podcasts in the world, take this into consideration.

Two-thirds of all podcasts have three or fewer episodes.

I don’t want to brag, but there aren’t a whole lot of podcasts out there that make it to 1,000 episodes.

To be sure, the reason why most podcasts do not reach 1000 episodes is because they aren’t daily podcasts.

For example, my friend Chris Christensen has been doing his podcast, the Amateur Traveler, since 2005, full 15 years before I started doing this one. However, because his is a weekly show, he has only recently recorded episode 847.

If this were a weekly show, I would only be around episode 142 right now.

One question which was raised in the Facebook group was if 1000 episodes were 1000 unique episodes. The answer is no. As of recording this episode, I have done 127 encore episodes, which means that this is the 873rd unique episode I’ve recorded.

So, that means later this year, I’ll have another milestone to celebrate.

Since the show started, there have been approximately 13,100,000 downloads of individual episodes. That number is approximate because podcast statistics are notoriously subjective. I use several different sources, and they all differ by a few percent.

Assuming an average of 10 minutes per episode, which is conservative, that means there has been 131 million minutes of Everything Everywhere Daily, which has been listened to.

That corresponds to 250 years of total listening time, or to put it another way, the total listening time is now greater than the age of the United States.

So far, the longest episode I’ve released was the episode on the Sight and Sound Decadal Survey, which was 19 minutes. The shortest episode clocked in at about 5 minutes, and quite frankly, I forgot which one it was.

I don’t actually have data to calculate the average time, but I do know the average time has increased since I started, by a few minutes.

Every episode, except for question and answer episodes, is read from a script. The average length of a script is currently around 2000 words.

To compare that to something you might be familiar with, that means almost every day, I have to write and research a 2000-word term paper. If each episode were double-spaced, each paper would be about ten pages.

If there are any students listening to this who complain about having to write a term paper, you do not have my sympathy.

Of course, I should add that there is a big difference between writing a podcast script and writing a term paper. The biggest is that I don’t have footnotes or endnotes because that doesn’t really translate to entertaining audio.

All of the episodes to this point have been done by myself with no help. I’ve had no assistant, no writers, no editors….nothing. The only help I get is from Glassbox Media which helps me sell advertising and promote the podcast.

That situation will probably change this year, which will be welcome, as it will allow me to improve the quality of the show and launch new projects.

With that being said, this week, I’ve asked the audience to share what this podcast means to you, and you delivered. Here are the messages you’ve left for me.

I want to thank all of you who left messages. Your feedback here and on the Facebook Group, the Discord Server, Twitter, and via email is always appreciated.

I want to give special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Executive Producer Charles Daniel, associate producers Thor Thomsen, Peter Bennett, as well as all the past producers of the show which you might occasionally hear in encore episodes.

The support of Patreons makes it possible for me to continue to do the podcast everyday.

With that, the celebration is now over, and it is time to start work on episode 1001.