TPN Turns Three Today

by | Feb 14, 2008 | Podcast, TPN

Happy Birthday TPN! Three years ago today TPN opened for business. Thanks to the WayBack Machine, we know what it looked like. In 2008 we have lots more shows, half a million friends, and each year is better than the last. My thanks to everyone who has contributed to the story so far – my family, the TPN hosts (past and present), our advertisers and, of course, you nice folks who keep listening to our shit. Oh and I’d like to thank LOTU. Without LOTU, I wouldn’t be here today.

The Biography Show #001 – Alexander The Great

by | Feb 9, 2008 | Podcast, TPN

It’s been a while since we’ve launched a new show on TPN so I’m excited to announce The Biography Show starts today! David Markham and I have enjoyed some great feedback from the audience of our Napoleon 101 podcast, so we’re doing another series together. The idea behind The Biography Show is to examine the lives of some of history’s most influential people. We kick off the series with a 90 minute talk about the life of Alexander III of Macedon, otherwise known as Alexander “The Great”.

The Biography Show

Compete vs Alexa – TPN growth for 2007

by | Jan 21, 2008 | TPN




Compete’s TPN ranking

Originally uploaded by cameronreilly

While we can’t compete with PodShow’s 14000% growth over 2007 (and we also haven’t raised $20 million from investors), Compete.com says TPN grew by 430% during 2007. I don’t think Compete’s numbers are accurate – my own logs say we only doubled in size – but hey, Adam seems to accept their view of things, so who am I to argue? Although they also say only 20,000 people visited TPN in December which is obviously a completely bogus number. It was more like 500,000 according to our logs. They claim to calculate only US traffic but still, that’s most of TPN’s traffic. Compete strikes me like Alexa – pretty flaky.

As you can see, according to Alexa we actually went backwards in 2007. So Compete says we grew by 430%, Alexa says we went backwards, our own server logs say we grew by about 200%.

SMH 15 January, 2008

by | Jan 15, 2008 | TPN

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age re-ran Andrew Bock’s article on podcasting which first appeared on December 20, 2007 only this time they used a photo of me they took in February 2005 (!). This is the same article I complained about here because I felt it was, deliberately or not, unbalanced. Still – I won’t deny it’s always strangely exciting to see a photo of yourself in the mainstream press. It’s happened to me a lot over the last few years but I still get a thrill out of it, even though logically I’m aware that it means little. TPN’s traffic won’t significantly increase. No worthy investors will ring me up. Old colleagues and bosses who used to give me a hard time probably won’t see it and squirm. I did like Mick Liubinskas’ analysis of the photo though:

        Analyse the Pic;

  1. He’s wearing glasses – He’s hip!
  2. He’s wearing a suit – He’s professional.
  3. He’s surrounded by books – He’s smart.
  4. He’s leaning on a laptop – He knows tech, but he runs it, it doesn’t run him.

Very insightful, Mick. I pointed out to him that Fairfax took this photo back in Feb 05 when we were just getting started. I remember the sunnies were sitting on a coffee table and the photographer said “Are those yours? Put them on.” Greatest piece of advice I ever got from a photographer. 🙂

Radio Is Boring

TPN Report Card 2007

by | Jan 15, 2008 | Melbourne, Podcast, TPN

2007 was a big year for TPN in lots of ways. We grew; we stumbled; we struggled; we survived. Bootstrapping a start-up isn’t glamorous. Trying to keep a fast-growing business alive when revenues are still small and you are funding it organically can be frustrating. Every day brings new challenges. Things you survive by telling yourself “one day it won’t be like this”.

We started off the year with a re-design of the homepage and lots of fast growth. Around the middle of year our server admin quit and I had to put a stop to adding new shows. Then a couple of months later our webdev quit. For the last couple of months we’ve been getting by with favours from friends whenever we need IT support. So it’s been frustrating on lots of levels. In March I thought we would finish the year with a million listeners a month. We missed that goal. Since March we’ve been hovering between 450,000 – 500,000 listeners a month. Now – when I compare that to some of the radio stations in Melbourne or Sydney, I feel pretty good. TPN, currently, one full-time employee. Me. No funding. No sales team. No IT team. Just me and a team of excellent, dedicated and PATIENT podcast producers who have tolerated our bumps over the last couple of years. I want to thank them all for their sense of humour when things go awry (like they did again over the last couple of days when out FTP server flaked on us) and their continued support for the TPN vision.

However, despite the struggles, it was a pretty good year. As you can see from the numbers below, we served nearly 5.5 million listeners during the year (okay, that number is slightly bullshit – it’s our monthly unique visitor numbers added together – but it sounds good so I’m sticking with it), who listened to nearly 7 million TPN podcasts (that number is legit). That’s a HUGE number, especially when you consider that since we launched in early 2005 we’ve only delivered a little over 11 million podcasts. Thinking about that 7 million number for a second – if we assume that each podcast is an average of 30 minutes long, that means you listened to us for 3.5 million hours (145, 833 days or 400 years non-stop) in 2007. No wonder your brain is hurting.

TPN 2007

Of course I also want to thank our listeners and supporters. Those of you who listen to our shows, interact with us on the blogs, in Facebook, at MODM, Twitter, Second Life, etc. Without you we really would be what the cynics in the mainstream media think we are – people sitting in our undies, talking to ourselves.