Spike in podcasts... Why?

​I don’t get it. Yesterday, 31 people listened to my audio podcasts. The day before it was 1. And the day before that it was 3.

And today so far today 6,851 have listened to my podcasts.

It doesn’t make sense. Sure, I cut into regular programming and did a breaking news interview with Hammond Lt. Richard Hoyda about a stabbing at a Strack and Van Til’s grocery store. And we posted that three-minute interview on our podbean page. But that only garnered 915 plays.

All the rest of the cuts from today got a ton of listens, too, including 650 of when my daughter called in on her way to a final in Madison, Wisconsin. And 640 listened to sportswriter Al Hamnik and me talk about the woes of the Bears. Al and I disagreed pretty heavily on firing coach Trestman and GM Emery – I love you like a brother, Jim, but you’re dead wrong on this one. It was pretty decent radio, but how could we go from about 20 listens each time Al came in to more than 600?

So what’s different today? First, we had this horrible stabbing and I went live on the air with the lieutenant at about 11am and then on a whim we just podcasted the interview. Secondly, we hired a Purdue Cal kid who graduates tomorrow to help us in the mornings with our podcasting, social media and the such. Maybe Alex posted our podcasts in a better manne, or tagged things better, or something. Ryan and I will have to ask him.

What else about podcasting? Ken Rutkowski of the Business Rockstars show that we air at noon called me at dinnertime to finalize a time for me to interview him… and we ended up talking about a bunch of radio and venture capital stuff. And out of pure coincidence, Ken dove heavily into the impact of podcasting and how it’s the futurere, gave me some to listen to, including Bulletproof Radio.

So there. We’ve gone from 31 to 6,851 in one day on our podcasts. I hesitate to get too excited about it, though. Call it trust issues, but I still think it’s some sort of spybot or internet robocall.