HPR4174: Of the Mic and the Mop

Hacker Public Radio

The Future of HPR

In episode hpr4109 "The future of HPR" Knightwise challenged us to look at HPR from the point of view of marketing to a business. His show was prompted by a post we put out entitled Happy new year - should we continue with HPR ?, wherein we asked you to vote on the future of HPR. The vote was a not so subtle redirect to our upload page.

TL;D[R|L]

This is likely to be a long show, so I'm adding the summary here.

Key Takeaways

1. More subscribers does not mean more contributors.
2. In person contact is the best way to get new contributors.
3. Use social media to bring people to HPR and not drive the discussions away from HPR.
4. Our interface point with the listening world is the RSS feed.
5. The Web site is the first point of contact for new contributors.
6. We are losing contributors due to fear of being "guilty by association".

Feed the queue

• Send in one show a year.
• Get one new host a year.
• Don't rush in shows, use the reserve queue.
• Follow the Scheduling Guidelines.

Look for Hosts at every opportunity

• Take every opportunity, work, school, hobbies, social media groups, to ask people to send in a show.
• Volunteer to host an HPR Booth at events, libraries, fairs, meetups, etc.
• Record interviews with interesting Projects.
• Get in touch with older hosts and remind them how much you miss their content.

Get our house in order

To be taken seriously as a project, we need to:

0. Finish the migration of the Back End.
1. Formalize our current implicit Code of Conduct.
2. Refresh the website, emphasizing our norms and values.
3. Enrich the RSS feeds to become more integrated on distribution channels.
4. Start giving talks at conferences promoting HPR, or Projects discussed on HPR.
5. Get HPR Published in Wikipedia, Industry, Tech and Hobby Magazines.
6. Assign dedicated Janitors on Official and Unofficial Platforms.

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Subscribers versus Contributors

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." W._Edwards_Deming

All the numbers given in this episode are the most conservative numbers we can give, as we have no financial incentive to do otherwise. We can be confident in the numbers as the rate of subscriber growth mirrors the growth of social media, and the growth of the Internet in general.

There have been 2,446,084 Total unique subscribers since the project began. That is at least 2.5 Million people that have not only heard about HPR, but have also actively subscribed to an HPR feed.

There have been 359 hosts since the project began.

The plots show that the number of monthly subscribers to HPR has slowly increased from 40,000 to over 120,000 between 2010 and 2022. It also shows for the same period the number of new hosts per month. The period between 2010 and 2016 shows a lot of new hosts joining at a rate of about three per month. This was when we were active at FLOSS Events. Between 2016 and 2023 the rate of new hosts drops to one every two months or so.

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Links

• Pepper and Carrot