[personlurking]

Great post

Is there a general ratio for how much audio you record per session vs how long your average podcast episode is? Do you cut, say, 25% or something like that? They seem to run 40-50 minutes, from checking your site.

Would going the Patreon route (since your podcast is ad-free now) be viable?

[timoth3y]

For most shows, I record 60 to 90 minutes of conversation to get 20 to 40 minutes of edited content. I try to edit down to the bone, where there is nothing else I feel I can take out.

That might seem a bit extreme, but some of my guests are not native English speakers, so there is a lot to fix in post-production.

[majewsky]

Not OP, but it wildly depends on the format. I do two different shows. One is live radio where the podcast version is a verbatim copy of the livestream (except for postprocessing and metadata), so 0% gets cut. The November episode has a fun 2-minute interlude where I fumble with the studio software trying to get music to play.

My other podcast is scripted and pre-produced. An episode usually comes in at 8 minutes, and I usually record around double that. For some sentences, I do 4-5 takes until I get it right. (That said, recording is really the smallest part. The biggest timesink on that podcast is research and writing the script, which takes around 3-4 hours per episode. Partly because of my perfectionist attitude.)

[diN0bot]

I'm interested in this, too.

Also, it seems like there are still ways to receive some revenue from creating useful content that thousands of people are interested in. Not because the money is so important, but because there are parts of community engagement that are fun to do and feel rewarding, and there are other parts that can be contracted.

I didn't understand the "make a media company" or nothing aspect considering he is still podcasting as a fun hobby anyway.

[michaelt]

  I didn't understand the "make a
  media company" or nothing aspect

If I quit my BigCo job to bootstrap a business from my savings, I'd want to recognise if the business was failing well before it lead me to personal bankruptcy. So I'd have a deadline and success criteria.

Presumably his success criteria for the become-a-pro-podcaster experiment wasn't being met selling his ad inventory alone, and selling extra inventory to his existing sales prospects got him closer.

[JoshTko]

As a consumer I almost always wish more was edited out. Too much time is wasted on random anecdotes, stories, etc. that have nothing to do with the topic hand. Maybe there are two different audiences as well. One that likes the podcaster and thus wasn't the unedited content the other could be content focused and only want the core of the content which is probably only 20% of the recording.