aronhubbard

It definitely was a factor. There was a lot wrong in the relationship, and that had a lot to do with it, plus the baggage you both get from being raised as children in a cult. I had been "pretending" to be a Witness for several years at that point, and the choices I had were to keep that up and probably go insane, or stop and see where the chips fell, and I chose the chip falling option.

Wellll.... Reddit decided to delete my first post, because I didn't fill out the template correctly, I guess, so since we were running late, I did the second one super high speed and left off Game of Thrones!

However, GoT is the reigning champ, statistically. We did 100k+ weekly listens at the height of this past season. It's hard to gauge exactly what our most popular show is, because the shows tend to leap frog each other. We experience 2x-3x audience growth from season to season. Breaking Bad used to hold the crown, then GoT slaughtered it this season. It would be hard to believe that The Walking Dead can catch up, but stranger things have happened. I think we're reasonably popular with the fanbases that we cover, maybe we're a bit more polarizing with Walking Dead fans, because we tend to rip the show when it is particularly braid dead.

I would be honored!

Yes, we actually have. So far we've not gotten any takers. Alan Sepinwall hooked us up with some people to talk to (thanks Alan!) but as you can imagine there is a LOT for them to worry about in regards to leaks and spoilers and I think we're just a bit too internety and fly by night at this point for them to have that kind of trust. I'd like to think as our profile continues to rise, maybe that will change, but it would absolutely help us out A LOT. Heck, we just did a semi-official podcast for HBO on The Leftovers, maybe that's a sign of things to come? On the other hand, we kind of pride ourselves on our reputations as "outsiders", so I'd be uncomfortable taking anything that would have any strings attached. Like, "we'll give you screeners and access to cast and crew, but you have to say good things about x, y, and z." No sale.

I don't think anyone has an exact answer to the iTunes thing, but it seems to be a combination of ratings/reviews/subscriptions, with some built in recency bias (shows that are getting reviews in the past few days will trump a show that hasn't gotten reviews recently), and there appears to be some manual curation on the part of the iTunes team going on as well. If you can hit new and notable a few times, it seems like it gets easier. The general advice is; have good artwork, keep a regular schedule, release several shows in the first 6-8 weeks to maximize your new and noteworthy potential, and consistently encourage your listeners to rate and review you. When you're building from the ground up, it takes a lot of time to build up a head of steam, but once you do, it starts snowballing.

We get our income from 33% direct listener support (Subbable.com, Patreon pretty soon, donations, etc) 33% from affiliate links (Amazon is the biggest and most successful for us) and 33% from advertising. It should be noted that we're not all the way there, yet, we're making the shortfalls up with our life savings, but our projections are looking really good. It was kind of a leap of faith, and so far, so good.