Unlocked: The State of Search Engine 2025
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, Search Engine listeners. So a few years ago, back when we first started telling stories on this feed, we were initially not making any money.
What challenges did the podcast face when it started?
Super normal for a new independent show. However, we were spending money on reporting trips to pay people like fact checkers and sound designers who are helping us tell our stories. So that turned into a problem, which we needed to solve. But we didn't want to run ads at first. So we put up a website where listeners could voluntarily pay for the show if they wanted to. And a few hundred people signed up, which gave me this silly idea, which is that if your boss is the person who pays you to work, my boss was now a few hundred internet strangers. And I thought we should have like a corporate style check-in every so often. So we scheduled what we called a board meeting, which was me and my collaborator Shruti in suits in front of a Zoom green screen background of a big fake spreadsheet, presenting on the so-called economics of our so-called business to a large group of internet strangers, and then fielding their questions.
It was fun. It was ramshackle. It felt a little dangerous, like a joke that wasn't a joke, a place where you weren't sure what the rules were, so you couldn't be sure if people would break them. And as our independent podcast has turned into something like a very small business, we've kept doing it. Now we run our board meetings once a year, live on the internet, in a jumbo-sized Zoom room. We get hundreds of people. Sometimes it nudges close to a thousand, which is the capacity for the room. We still take questions, but we also do commit pretty seriously to talking about the evolving mission of our show, its health, its numbers. Anyway, typically these are private for our paid listeners, but we wanted to share one with everybody just this once as a special holiday occasion.
If you'd like to join one live in the future, you can sign up to be an incognito mode supporter at searchengine.show. Also, if you sign up today, you'll be able to just watch video of this thing you're about to listen to, which includes some very snazzy slides. Okay, here it goes.
Okay. PJ, are you nervous?
Less nervous than usual, which still means relatively nervous. I would say like I'm at a 50%. Not at my total nerves capacity, just out of the normal nerves. Okay, should I begin? Let's do it. Greetings, everybody. We are now commencing our annual board meeting for the year 2025, fiscal quarter four. I want to open today with some remarks about the internet. When the internet is good, there's nothing better. When it's bad, there's nothing worse. That's not my line. I cribbed it from a famous speech by a former FCC commissioner named Newton Minow. It's his sentence. When he wrote it, he was talking about TV. It was 1961. Minow had just been appointed to the FCC by John F. Kennedy. And he saw his mission as essentially to force TV broadcasters to make TV less stupid.
How did the podcast evolve into a small business model?
He thought that the broadcasters had tricked themselves into believing that audiences were dumber than they actually were, that the viewers actually wanted the garbage they were being fed. This was before PBS, before NPR, long before cable. TV at that point really just meant game shows, westerns, brain-dead comedies, and then 15 minutes of news a day. And Minow, TV's new regulator, in his very first speech to the broadcasters, broadcasters who, by the way, were expecting compliments, he told them what he really thought about their work. In his speech, he says, when television is good, nothing, not the theater, not the magazines, not the newspapers, nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing's worse.
I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and just stay there for a day. Without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a ratings book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:07
2
What challenges did the podcast face when it started?
0:07–3:24
3
How did the podcast evolve into a small business model?
3:24–7:11
4
What insights were shared during the annual board meeting?
7:11–8:53
5
How is the current state of the internet affecting podcasting?
8:53–24:42
6
What decisions were made regarding the podcast's future direction?
24:42–47:56