When I announced the Talking Shop Down Under podcast back in February earlier this year I wasn’t really sure what would happen.  I didn’t know if I’d be able to find enough people to talk to, wether I could keep up an (almost) weekly broadcast schedule and do it on a shoe-string budget, or even if the show would be interesting enough for people to listen to more than once, and yet here I am at the end of the year having just published the 40th episode for the year and with a slowly growing audience base.

Wow!  I’m very, very surprised.

I’m so appreciative of all the guests who have appeared on the show and have had a great time talking with each and every one of them.  I’ve also really enjoyed the audience interactions I’ve been having via Twitter, and lately with the livestream broadcast of the recordings.

This last one is something I’d like to try more of.  It’s obviously much rawer than the edited episodes, but I think having you listening in live while an episode is being recorded gives you a much greater chance to hear the questions asked that you want asked, not just whatever pops into my head at the time, so keep an eye on the @talking_shop twitter account and when an episode is recording feel free to ask questions via the chat room.  We may even try for some dial-in talk-show style interactions in the new year.

Anyway, here’s some stats for those who are interested.  As a note it’s always hard to know just how many people listen because subscribers to the feed and episode downloads don’t always mean the show was listened to, plus the download stats from archive.org (where I host episodes) seem to update at random times and not very often at that.

Subscribers:

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The show is sitting at around 250 people who follow the feed and as you can see, the number of listeners has steadily grown throughout the year.  Those little blue spikers are when people are downloading/listening to the mp3 file.

Most shows get around 300-350 listeners an episode, with the largest number so far being 700+ for the Scott Barnes/WPF is Dead episode, and next being the WebForms MVP episode with Tatham Oddie.

As would be expected, most people who follow the show are from Australia, which is to be expected since that’s the audience I’m targeting. The next 4 countries of the top 5 subscribing nations are:

  • United States
  • United Kingdom
  • Belgium
  • Mexico

And finally, for the curious, more people listen to the show via the RSS feed than they do from ITunes (though it’s a close run thing).

So if you’ve been a regular listener this year then I tip my hat to you and say THANK YOU!

P.S. Suggestions for guests and other show ideas are always welcome.