Superfan Giovanni

They promoted the hell out of the initial run of podcasts about five years after RSS feed technology was created to allow embedded MP3 and MP5, this whole thing.

So there really wasn't any money in the industry.

Even Adam Kroll's morning show podcast wasn't really promoted.

Behind the scenes, they would tell him about his streaming numbers.

Like, oh, you had 5,000 streaming minutes today or something, but it wasn't actually helpful.

The show was actually getting 40,000 unique downloads per file, and they released in really inconvenient 12-file formats.

So there's 12 segments released individually each day.

There was no complete files.

So each of those segments was getting somebody to grab them 40,000 times on average, which is pretty big.

And when the podcast started up, there was this initial idea that maybe 25,000 downloads was enough and like to cap bandwidth or downloading abilities because they didn't want an unlimited bill.

After some intense arguing by myself and Mike Chaffee, who I tried to convince we're going to need a bigger boat.

Exact quote I used from Jaws.

We then uncapped whatever bandwidth idea that people in charge had at the time.

And the show hit, I don't know, 5 million downloads.

And then we got almost as many for the second episode.

And then they had to, of course, go over to Libsyn.

That was a whole confusing thing.

And the third episode aired with Therese and Brian.

That initial success essentially took Joe Rogan from posting, like, stick cam and Ustream videos and various stuff on his website.

It's really, like, interesting blogs he used to write.