posted by Andrews_seat on October 6, 2010 | 4 comments
Only 12 lessons in the last 26 days. Is anything wrong at PC? You have never dropped that low before. In case it is seasonal, I checked the same period in '09, and then you released 17 lessons. In '08 it was 32. It seems your lesson output just keeps falling.
Andrews_seat on October 6, 2010 | reply
No worries. I was just worried that the death of CSLPod might be an indication of a downturn in this business. But I guess that when one rival vanishes, the rest can consolidate their market. I have to say though, that the value of this site, and others like it, lies in the podcasts. It is the podcasts that bring me here.
Andrews_seat on October 6, 2010 | reply
And to add some figures for the number of podcasts, here are the numbers by quarter for 2009 and 2010:
2009: 1st - 91, 2nd 84, 3rd - 70, 4th - 61, Total - 306
2010: 1st - 54, 2nd 65, 3rd - 65, 4th - ??, Total so far - 184
Nowhere Man,
Things are fine. 2008 was a special time since it was just after launch and we had a lot of material to push out the door that had already been prepared in advance. We aim to have 3-4 podcasts out a week these days. So we should be keeping fairly steady at around the 2009 figures.
Admittedly, we've been a bit below that for the past while. The culprit here is a lack of really good dialogues we want to turn into podcasts, and is related to the ongoing holidays in China which tend to disrupt our recording sessions. I suspect we're also being a bit more selective about the kinds of dialogues we publish too, which may play into it, although the coverse holds too: when we have a lot of great stuff we tend to publish materials faster. And we are putting more effort into backend work like expanding the writing pad so there isn't as high a premium on making sure we have a new lesson every day.
That said, we are managing to keep busy and will work to push out some more content fairly quickly. And we have some exciting news we'll be sharing with people in the next week or two as well which may help explain what we've been up to. Popup Chinese is certainly not going anywhere. :)
--david
Thanks for running the numbers, Bob. They feel about right and actually seem remarkably stable. I think you're right that the number of companies trying to make money from the Chinese education market is contracting although I hadn't heard about CSLPod in particular. We are planning to expand, but our biggest challenge remains getting visibility in places like iTunes and Google.