First, I’d love to hear feedback from listeners on the podcast. This post is going to deal specifically with length of the podcast. In the past I’ve tried to keep episodes to around 30 minutes. The idea being that people can listen to an episode during a commute and that they have other podcasts the listen to on a regular basis. It also allowed me to split up longer conversations so i could more easily release content on a regular basis. One conversation could be three weeks of work with some extra editing.
I think I’m going to ditch that and just let the conversations run for as long as they do. A couple reasons for that: people pick and choose episodes and reduce the extra editing. Towards the end of the podcast I started getting more insights into how people listened to the podcast. I found that I had a regular listener base but also a lot of people who would pick and choose the episode to download. For example, one of the more popular episodes was on studying for the OSCP. It was downloaded a lot. Searching the internet I found it on a lot of reddit threads as a suggestion for people studying to get their OSCP. I think breaking up the podcast makes it harder for people to listen to the content they want. They have to go through multiple podcasts with an intro and an outro.
On the backend there’s a lot of work that goes into a podcast episode. One episode of 30-60 minutes is usually about three to four hours of production time not including the recording. I have to schedule guests, research the topic to make the questions, and then do post editing to clean up and put together the audio. While breaking up the podcasts gets me more episodes it adds a little complexity to the editing process and I want to simplify that. It does mean I’ll have to book more guests but I think that adds more content naturally to the podcast and site.
Thoughts are appreciated. Hit the comment section below or reach out to me via the site contact form or LinkedIn.
This blog post first appeared on Exploring Information Security.