Admittedly, I haven't read DI in quite a while, but seeing this post brought back a flood of memories from my college days of waiting for the next article to drop. This blog was the precursor of an entire genre of "generally interesting shit" that has kind of underpinned most of the spirit of podcasting today. Shows like 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab and so on owe I think a little something to this blog.
The amount asked for is meager, and I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.
> 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab
It's funny you mention those three in particular. We've collaborated with Stuff You Should Know several times, and we almost worked with both 99PI and RadioLab on separate occasions (i.e., I pitched ideas that got some traction, though they didn't ultimately materialize). I still think my pitch for RadioLab is a good one, though it's a throwback to when they did episodes with three stories around a central theme (e.g., Blood).
> I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.
Thanks! If this fundraiser works out, you're part of the reason we get to keep going.
Generally interesting shit, as a category, has been shedding audience figures. It's unclear which of the explanations for this is correct.
Could be the rapidly deteriorating attention span of the typical person that now doesn't have to look too hard to find answers to things in the first place anymore. Previous to the internet (not that this is anything new to say), most people had to learn a little bit about most things to get answers about them, especially if it wasn't something they had much of a natural proclivity for. Information retention isn't great either now. So mostly the audience for generally interesting things now is more limited to people with a specific interest in whatever that thing is, and people who just seek out interesting things. Though, and no disrespect to DamnInteresting intended, it also makes the interesting things seem less arcane, which also could be affecting your hits. People can be that way.
Just more focused places to find it, I think. I loved the historical seafaring stories that DI would post, but then I realized that there were subject matter podcasts that dug into these stories even more. So I think it was just specialization taking over.