As you may have noticed if you are subscribed to our feeds, we haven’t been posting a lot of content lately. We had to take some time off to decide what we would do and restructure everything, but now we’re back in full force!
We now have new narrators, new blogs, we’ll be posting regularly again and, hopefully, growing faster than before.
The old Hear a Blog
The problem with our initial approach was that, since we wanted to build a business, we focused on monetization very early on.
What we envisioned originally was a system where we “hired” narrators, paying them a small fee for each post they recorded plus profit sharing from their posts, once we got advertising money to support ourselves. We did this for one year, mostly with one great narrator (C. M. Fisher) and later recruiting more. With that we had some pretty good results:
- We peaked at 20 narrated posts per week.
- Over one year we reached 13,000 downloads per month, with over 2,000 subscribers.
- We got mentioned in many of our narrated blogs, and appeared on TWiST twice.
- We partnered with an experienced ad media company.
- We were a finalist at Seedcamp Paris.
- And most importantly, we heard back from a lot of our listeners, with encouraging words, and stories of how we helped them in their daily lives.
But we still failed to meet our objectives, by far. The big mistake was underestimating how big you need to get before an advertiser will care about you. Especially in audio, where advertising production is expensive and only big guys will do it, so you need a lot of traffic to make any difference for them.
As we now know, not thinking about how to make money with your content is wrong, but trying to make money too early can kill you as well. What we did was the equivalent of Google trying to sell ads when it was called Backrub (Did you know that Google was called Backrub?).
We funded Hear a Blog entirely out of our pockets, without any outside investors and we don’t have enough capital to grow to 10 times our size or to keep on going as we were for years. The obvious step was to call it a failure and close down.
The new Hear a Blog
We spent a while trying to figure out what to do, and every time we “decided” we’d close down, we’d get an e-mail from someone.
“Hey, guys? Still there? I hope you won’t go away.”
“What happened to the narrations? I used to listen to this or that blog going to work!”
In short, too many people cared to just pull the plug.
After some time of soul-searching we are now leaving the center of the stage to the real stars: the narrators. We have a new narrators page with pictures, bios, and contact information. You can put a face to the voice and if you like them, click the “Facebook like” button and let them know. We want to be enablers, we want them to shine.
We turned off the ads. We don’t pay a narration fee anymore but we will do profit sharing, when there’s a profit. And we’ll share more than what we originally planned. While at first we tried to control every aspect of the narrations, today the narrators set their own artistic direction. They can decide which blogs and which posts to narrate, and how to narrate them. Let them know if you like their work!
We’d like to thank C. M. Fisher, Michael Smith, Hannah Crum, Sharon Brogden, Michael Hackner and Jared Kimball. We would not be able to do this without you. Thank you for being in our team!
We also want to thank and welcome Jeff Jarvis, Dan Ariely, Steve Pavlina, Venture Hacks and Dave Mc Clure. Thanks to our new approach, we are now able to narrate you all!
And of course, thanks to our loyal listeners, who have stayed subscribed through all the hardships, and stayed patient while we figured it out. We are now officially back in business, and this time, hopefully, for good.
If you are into podcasts, you are also into gadgets. That is, the gadgets to listen to podcasts. There are a lot of alternatives. You have the usual i-devices, like iPod, iPhone. You have all the other phones, and even people using GPS devices (to listen to podcasts on the car).