I was asked to give bio for a conference. It wasn't approved, but here nobody can stop me: "Maxime Lenormand doesn't have a clue what he's doing with his life: at the moment he plays around with satellite imagery hoping to make something useful out of it. When he's not doing that he asks people long winded questions about the meaning of life, what books they like and how the heck they ended up also playing with maps all day"
Reflecting on 50 episodes of Minds Behind Maps
Hey there,
A few days ago, I published episode 50 of the Minds Behind Maps podcast
I also recently released a video on a completely different format, trying my hand at making videos for a much broader audience, so I wanted to take some time to reflect on the process a bit.
What does a 50 episode podcast about maps look like?
I'm a data scientist so let's start numbers.
The industry standard for podcasts is download numbers, counting -as the name suggests- how many times a podcast file has been downloaded. It doesn't actually tell you how many people listened though. A lot of podcast end up au automatic download by podcast players, but that doesn't mean they ever get listened to. The data scientist find it a bit frustrating sometimes but that's also the beauty of an open standard like podcasting.
Anyways, all that aside these are the latest podcast numbers for the podcast:
That being said I also publish the podcast on Youtube, which gives you a stupid amount of analytics, and actually counts the number of views. The metric people track on Youtube are views, here's what is looks like for me:
So all in all, that's about 70k views + downloads for 50 episodes (I've also uploaded clips of episodes on Youtube too so it's not exactly true but close enough).
Not bad, but I'm not the next Joe Rogan anytime soon
The number are all well and good, and while I do think sharing them can be valuable for anyone wanting to get an idea of what audience you can expect from sharing stuff online, I think the real value is in the depth of impact that can happen when sharing the stuff one makes to the world.
Every single view & listen is a real person
That's something I still haven't quite wrapped my head around and yet it's pretty obvious (unless one of you has gotten a bot farm to inflate those numbers, in which case my ego thanks you but please stop).
I've had people reach out to me saying they've enjoyed these conversations. I know people have listened to these when looking for jobs, have learned about new things, even shared these to their families to help them understand what they do. Regardless of the numbers, that is the impact that matters.
Personally I've gotten to hang out with some very cool people and I still am baffled that some people agree to spend some of their time with me. I often thank guests for spending some of their valuable time with me because I do believe our time is our most valuable asset. That also goes for the people listening, I'm incredibly grateful that people take the time to listen to these.
A bonus Behind the Scenes podcast episode
As you can see from the Youtube analytics screenshot above, this podcast isn't exactly making me tons of money. Thankfully the sponsors give me quite a bit more than 14€ but it's still relatively little compared to how much making I have decided to put into this podcast.
That is one of the reasons I started a Patreon a little while ago, and have been sharing some behind the scenes there. And that is where I will be sharing a bonus episode going through some deeper reflections on the journey so far, how I've been thinking about this podcast as something I want to be doing for many years to come, and venturing into making content for a wider audience.
You can find this bonus episode right here
(There's a 2min preview on Patreon if you're on the fence about it)
Patreon has setup an integration with Spotify so you can also directly link your Patreon & Spotify account together if you like listening to your podcasts on Patreon.
You could also link the RSS feed to most other podcast apps, I personally like Overcast which does support importing RSS feeds.
Patreon is also the best place to support my work, and the place where I share most of the behind the scenes of the podcast and all the projects I'm working on.
If you've enjoyed these conversation, would like to support what I do and get a peek behind the scenes, please consider supporting me financially there
Cheers,
Maxime
Maxime Lenormand
I was asked to give bio for a conference. It wasn't approved, but here nobody can stop me: "Maxime Lenormand doesn't have a clue what he's doing with his life: at the moment he plays around with satellite imagery hoping to make something useful out of it. When he's not doing that he asks people long winded questions about the meaning of life, what books they like and how the heck they ended up also playing with maps all day"
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