The Story of HowStuffWorks

and producers and a podcast network. And I got a request from Chad Ingles on Twitter to follow up that story because a couple of years have gone by and some other stuff has happened, and besides, while I talked mostly about the experience of writing and recording at the company, I didn't really go into as much of the background of the company itself as I could have. So rather than just do a follow up, I'm kind of doing a big picture journey of How Stuff Works up to today.

But there's gonna be a lot of high level stuff because there's no point in getting down and dirty with every single era of How Stuff Works. So here's an episode about what's been going on over the last several years. Now to give the quick rundown. Marshall Brain and yes that is his real name, founded the how stuff Works website back in the late nineteen nineties, though it wasn't

an honest to goodness business just yet. Marshall Brain had taught computer science at North Carolina State University prior to working on the website, and he wanted to create a website that could give clear, concise explanations for different subjects. Essentially, it would grow into this effort to demystify the universe, one topic at a time, and it would include articles and illustrations to really break down well how stuff works.

One of the earliest and most successful articles was about our engines, and it would sort of establish the model for all future how x works style articles on the site. Brain raised funds in the effort to launch how stuff Works as a business, and with around five million dollars in investments, he launched how stuff Works the company in

January two thousand. He was able to secure investments to get things in motion, and by two thousand one the company had grown to nearly forty employees and the goal was still the same. It was to create engaging, easy to understand articles explaining the universe one topic at a time. But while the site was creating content, it was having trouble attracting advertisers and making enough revenue through web advertisement to support operations, and that made it necessary to seek

additional rounds of funding or go out of business. The company would also have to downsize, laying off about half the staff. And I guess I could explain really quickly how web advertising works. I'm sure most of you have at least a basic understanding of it. Typically, for a website like this, you were selling some sort of real

estate on the web page. It might be the right rail, it might be a banner ad, it might be a pop up ad, and you get paid for the number of page views that the web page with that advertisement gets, so the more people who view that page, the more money you make. Sometimes advertisers also will include something about click through, so instead of the number of page views, it's how many people actually clicked on the ad to

go to whatever the the ad was leading. So in those cases you have to hope for a viewer action or a visitor action rather than just viewing the page. So that was essentially the basis for all web revenue for a very long time. It's changed a little bit, although web advertising still plays an incredibly important part in UH and generating money for sites that are on the web,

like news sites and things like that. So Marshall Brain had initially served as the CEO of this company, but he stepped aside for Marco Fregenal, a co founder of the company, to take over, and he would leave in two thousand one. Marco that is, and Dean Jordan's, who had served as the president for the Carolina Hurricanes the

sports team, became the new CEO of the company. Jordan arranged to have a private company called the Convex Group purchase how Stuff Works before he departed and was replaced by a guy named Joe kiss ak Now. The purchase price for how Stuff Works was reported to be a bit more than a million dollars according to the Business Journal. Investors in the company were assigned promissory notes that they had the potential to pay off big time if the Convex Group were to sell How Stuff Works to a

different company. More on that in just a little bit. So How Stuff Works had been based in Carrie, North Carolina, which is just outside Raleigh. The Convex Group was a group of investors based in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the helm of the Convex Group was a guy named Jeff Arnold, the founder of web md. So. Arnold had founded web m d and and it was phenomenally successful. Propelled Arnold into an entrepreneurial role, and he started a company called lid Rock, which used to put c d s in

the lids of drinks sold at places like movie theaters. Yes, we used to have lid Rock c ds in our office once upon a time. He became chairman and CEO of How Stuff Works, and the headquarters moved to Atlanta, though a lot of people still stayed in North Carolina. The site did grow a bit in those early years. It really peaked in two thousand five, a couple of years before I would come on board, at least in

terms of traffic going to the website. But then traffic began slowing down and the company had deal with the implications of that, including reduced revenue. And if your costs remain the same but your revenue is going down, you start to realize you're gonna need to make some changes pretty soon or you'll be on a slippery slope to bankruptcy. Now, when I joined house Stop Works in the winter of two thousand seven February two thousand seven, I still remember it.

At that point, it was still under the umbrella of the Convex Group. Jeff Arnold maintained an office in our headquarters. It was a really big office, pretty swanky. Actually. We would eventually turn that office into a break area that nobody on the editorial side ever really used. It was really nice, had ping pong table and other stuff in it, and um or actually it was a foosball table and some other stuff in it, and and none of us in editorial ever felt like we had the time to

go over there. But the sales team liked it, and the marketing team liked it, but um that's beside the point. Anyway. A few of my current coworkers, people who still work day to day with me, we're actually around back then. They either had been working there for a little while or they joined shortly after I did, and they also got to experience what life was like under the Convex era.

And when I started, my job was pretty straightforward. I would receive an article assignment and I had a week to write the article, and then a week to revise the article based on any editorial responses, and I'd have another article to write as I was revising the previous ones. So I'd be working on one article and finishing up another one each week. So I'd research art for the

articles as well. I would either request illustrations from some in house talent that we had at the company, or I would select images on the web and then try to reach out to get permission from the rights holders to get permission to use the photos on the site. This was in the old Wild West Web days, when even taking that step was seen as being pretty conservative. There are a lot of people who were just grabbing images and posting them online without any effort to track

down whoever owned the rights to that image. Now these days, how Stuff Works purchases licenses from various stock photo libraries to make sure that any images used on the site are done so with no possible ownership problems, because one thing that can happen, and it has happened to lots of websites out there, is that they will post an image that they don't have the rights to, and then someone with the rights will end up making a big fuss about it legitimately, so I mean it's the rights

to their intellectual property. And then typically that sort of stuff can end up going to court. Usually it's settled out of court. But that's a problem no one wants to have because at the very least, it will probably mean taking the art down for an article and needing to replace it with something else. Uh. At the at the most, it's going to mean a big payout that you're gonna have to make to somebody when you could have avoided that just by going through something like the

stock photo route. Now every week I would join my fellow writers. There are really only two other writers back in those days that Tracy Wilson of Stuff You Missed in History Class was one of them. She was the senior writer on staff. Then there was me, and then we had another writer who wrote what we called question of the Day articles. Those were much shorter articles that

tried to answer a simple question each day. Uh. And then the editor editors also would meet there, along with the interim head of editorial at the time, and we would talk about article ideas. We would have a pitch session, we'd have a conversation about which ones we thought were interesting, and then eventually the assignments would be based off of

those discussions and then would go out to the various writers. Generally, before writing an article, the writer would create a list of questions that he or she expected the article to be able to answer. So you'd say, all right, you've got how washing machine means work. Here are the questions I think this article needs to answer. So it might be who invented the washing machine? How old is the

washing machine? How does washing machine clean clothes? Like these would all be the basic questions that you think an article should answer, and you would share that with the other members of the editorial team, and they could add more questions so that you made sure that you had a good, fleshed out article that addressed all the questions it should. Otherwise you might overlook something and it could

be something simple, it could be something fundamental. In a lot of cases, the questions that would get added, either mostly by Tracy or myself, would be about physics and science, so not just how something works, but why does it

work that way? What makes it possible? Though, we were often the sticks in the mud that would add those questions, saying, well, it's not just enough for you to say it does this thing, We really do need to know how it is it anyway, it gave people the chance to create a framework for their articles as well, kind of thinking out what uh structure the article should take, and we

called this the initial approach. Then the writer would start pulling research both online and offline and get an understanding needed to write the article in question. The writing staff took up a relatively small amount of the space we had on the fifteenth floor of an office building. The building we were in at the time. This office was in a part of Atlanta called Buckhead that has lots

of shopping and restaurants. Buckett mostly caters to a slightly higher end crowd, kind of a the upper middle class maybe lower upper class kind of crowd, and it was also in close proximity to Mr Arnold's home. I'm sure that was coincidental. The rest of our floor was taken up with web developers who were building out and supporting the features that made our site work very important. Obviously there's no website without them, and they were great, they

were fantastic. And then we also had our sales and marketing teams in charge of making deals for web advertising and then you know a few others as well. Now, starting shortly after I joined, the company began to make a more concerted effort to build out the editorial staff. Like I said, when I started, Tracy and I were really the only full time staff writers. A couple of years before I came to How Stuff Works, the staff

had been quite a bit larger. In fact, they were even working on really fun ideas that were grouped under the the title stuff Oh. These were articles that were more kind of hypothetical in nature and and a little more lighthearted, things like who would win in a fight Superman or a Jedi? That kind of stuff like things that you wouldn't typically find on a house Stuff Works web page. But that staff was long gone by the time I joined, and so with STUFFO for that matter.

So there have been departures and layoffs in the editorial department before my arrival, and it brought it down to that small size of just Tracy and I being the full time staff writers. We also had a few freelance writers who would contribute articles occasionally, and we had the Stuff of the Day or the Question of the Day uh writer as well. Now then we had a guy named Carl Burne, who joined our team to head up the editorial department. We began adding more people to the

editorial staff, people like Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant. They joined on, and behind the scenes, a big deal was slowly coalescing, though most of us working on articles only got hints that something was going on at the time. I'm sure there were other people in the editorial staff who knew much more than I did at the time. I tend to be pretty far behind on those sort of things. I'm not the most observant of people, I

think when it comes to corporate culture. But yes, there was a big, big thing going on, and that big thing was a deal between the Convex Group and Discovery Communications. That's the company that owns the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, TLC and more. Discovery, as it turned out, was struggling to create a digital footprint. The company was doing really well in cable, but companies are measured in growth year over year typically, and Discovery was starting to run out

of places to grow into, particularly in North America. It had pretty much reached saturation in the United States, and it was hard to grow in a place where most of the cable subscribing population already has access to your channels. The future appeared to be online anyway, so there was a strong incentive to invest in growing the company's Internet presence.

Discovery hadn't had a whole lot of success in that regard, despite being a big media company, and that led to the deal in which the Convex Group would sell How Stuff Works to Discovery Communications for the princely sum of two hundred fifty million dollars. Those promissory notes must have

looked pretty darn good at that point. Remember this was initially a five million dollar investment, and then the value had crept down to a million dollars and it was sold for two hundred fifty million dollars, an incredible deal. Discovery told The Wall Street Journal that the plan was to leverage the House Stuff Works website to quote or as quote, the cornerstone of an effort to bring its

vast library of video content to the web end quote. So, in other words, the way Discovery was looking at How Stuff Works was largely as a platform for all of the video that Discovery was sitting on in its countless hours of production of various television series. That's not exactly how it turned out, and honestly, I'm a little thankful for that, because if how stuff Works had only become a repository for uh discovery videos, then I might not have a job. The acquisition did bring with it some

painful changes, if I'm going to be brutally honest. Way back in the day, when we were under the Convex Group, how stuff Works employees had a an unbelievably super sweet benefits package. I mean, it was incredible. It included a health plan, the basic health plan, in which the company paid the entire cost. There was no employee contribution apart from the regular copay stuff, so your monthly contribution was completely covered by your employer. It was just your co

pay that you had to pay. That was incredible, it was it made medical care very affordable. And way back in those days, we would also get our paychecks every two weeks. It was just a bi weekly schedule. Then we had the acquisition and things changed. Discovery couldn't operate like an internet startup that was run by entrepreneurs, you know. And it to be totally fair, I mean, this was a major company. They could not operate at that scale with those same sort of benefits, it just wasn't possible.

So the health plan would mean employees would have to pay for coverage. There was now going to be an employee contribution each month, and that was an initial blow to a lot of folks on staff who hadn't really budgeted for that. And in addition, Discoveries pay schedule, at least at the time, I don't know what it is now that at the time it was fixed to be the fifteen and the thirty of every month, or the closest work day to whatever those dates are. You know,

obviously February it's going to be et cetera. All to align with the Discovery schedule. It meant that we were actually gonna have to go one extra week without a paycheck, just because the way the calendar fell. So that was kind of scary for some people who weren't you know, they didn't have a whole lot of money put aside, and so to go an extra week without a paycheck, plus knowing that some of that money was going into an employee contribution to a health plan was a little

bit of a tough pill to swallow. Now, as it turns out, Discovery made some concessions to ease the transition a bit. Uh. The company did try to make it a little bit easier for people, but I distinctly remember early on before that happened, the anxiety in our office was pretty palpable, especially amongst certain people. Some of us were fortunate, like I happened. My wife happens to have very good benefits, so I was able to rely on on that instead on her benefits, and so that I

had a cushion there. But not everyone was in as privileged a position as I was. Now. Our time with Discovery head its ups and downs. On the good side, we were able to launch podcasts for the very first time back in two thousand and eight. That was under Discovery Stuff you Should Know was the first of our podcasts out of the gate, and then we become and remain our most popular show in the network. We also got the chance to work more in video. Occasionally. I

remember shooting videos in which I juggled flaming torches. There was a series I shot with Chris Palette, my original co host, where we talked about a Windows mobile app for How Stuff Works. That were a lot of fun. Uh. The app is, as far as I know no longer Things since Windows Mobile isn't really a thing, but those videos still live on if you want to do a search for them, and they are goofy just like me.

We also butted up against some issues back then under Discovery, such as creating a lot of custom content for advertisers. Custom content is a fun way of saying, the advertiser would really like you to write about this topic, and they'll give you money for you to do it. And it's not always a bad thing. I don't I don't mean to say it's automatically bad. It's not. If it's done right, it can end up being great because it

benefits them, it benefits you. You can get more access to experts and insight than you would on a normal assignment, and so if it's a good assignment, it could be a great fit. But sometimes in the process of making a big sale, you end up promising some deliverables that might in the long run hurt your operations. And we had a couple of instances of that back in the Discovery days. And I'm not blaming it one here. I mean, those sales were big, and they were important and they

helped us stay in business. But at the same time, uh, they weren't great from a content perspective. We had to write a lot of articles that the editorial department felt were a little repetitive and uh, focus too much on some narrow topics, and that was not great. And visitors were noticing too. They were we were getting emails about it. So it was a bit of a growing pains kind

of thing. Now, it did mean that we were able to learn from the experience and establish a better policy regarding sales and custom content moving forward, So it was valuable in the long run, but it was a little rough. Alt a lot more to say, But first, since we're speaking of paying the bills, let's take a quick break,

all right, I'm gonna be real with you guys. One other thing that happened during the Discovery years that was a bit tough on some of us was that there were more than a few rounds of layoffs in our time with Discovery. The Hell Stuff Works team was rolled into the overall Discovery Digital team, and Discovery was struggling a bit creating on working a holistic approach to the digital platforms. It had a lot of them, and it wasn't really sure about what to do with all of them.

We never really felt like we were part of a cohesive online strategy, and at one point I realized that the editorial department had been reduced to the point that almost every single person who was still on staff also happened to have a podcast. The writers and editors who weren't on podcasts, most of them weren't on staff anymore unless they were at the most senior level of editor.

And I don't think there was anything personal about these decisions, but it was a tough thing to see, and it also kind of painted a picture that podcasting might be the future for the company, but in a way that nobody wanted to see. I had a lot of good coworkers who were let go, and frankly I missed them. They were great to work with. Anyway, We just kept plugging away. The podcasts were growing, but rarely were we running any advertising on them, so they still weren't really

a revenue generator. And for a while we were doing really well in search traffic. People would search topics on Google and frequently our page would pop up in the first few results. And that's great, but it's also a double edged sword because search algorithms can change, and what works well for you one day might not end up working so well the next day. And that's what happened a couple of times. Google would tweak the search algorithm and sometimes we wouldn't show up in the top results,

even if we had an article on that topic. And this illustrates an important point anyone running an Internet business should keep in mind. Search engine optimization or SEO is important. It's often how people will end up finding your stuff, but relying heavily on search result means always having to play catch up to the search engines in question, which, let's be honest, it's really Google that we're talking about here. So when Google changes, you have to change too, or

else you'll see a drop in traffic. And this means your platform is dependent upon something outside of your own control. It's important to try and mitigate that by either using multiple platforms or establishing your own platform as a must visit place. And that was always the goal, but it's easier said than done. We kept writing articles, and we kept recording podcasts. I kept going to c e s

every year. Our office in Buckhead got smaller. At one point we occupied the fifteen floor of an office building. Then we reduced down to about half of that floor, with the other half being leased out to another company. Then we moved down to the eleventh floor and we took up even less space. As editorial staff, we went from having cubicles to work stations with a little divider between them, and now we don't even have the dividers. It was a series of changes that were difficult to

get used to. We also would have to record podcasts in a corner office in those eleventh floor days, and that corner office was above Peach Tree Street, which is a major road in Atlanta, and so you can hear a lot of traffic noises. You could occasionally hear a whistle because we had Baton Bob, who is a local character here in Atlanta, who would march up and down Peach Tree blowing a whistle. The Ambassador of Smiles is fantastic to see on the street, but not necessarily someone

you want to have whistling on your podcast every week. Also, we would occasionally get protesters outside the building, not for how stuff works. They were protesting a different business that had its headquarters in the same building we were in. But you can still hear them occasionally, so if you listen to episodes from around or fourteen, you might hear some of that noise. Also around that time, I got

to start a series called Forward Thinking. Initially it was solely a video series that looked at ways science and technology could make a positive impact on the future, and eventually we launched a companion podcast, also called Forward Thinking, which I co hosted with Lauren Vogelbaum and Joe McCormick. In addition to Forward Thinking, we were also shooting videos for series like brain Stuff. Our video production really was

beginning to ramp up. In fact, before we moved down to the eleventh floor, we had the Eternal Meeting series of videos that Connel Byrne. You know, he actually went into a a conference room, all of us kind of gathered around it, and for about forty five minutes he gave us a bogus meeting using lots of of of

business speak that really meant nothing, but was amazing. And if you've ever seen the videos of Josh and Chuck where they're texting each other and you're getting the little text messages as they are talking about some sort of interesting topic, that came from that long, long video shoot, and it was a phenomenal phenomenal afternoon. In the spring of fourteen, our time with Discovery Communications would come to an end. We were sold off to another company called Blue Cora b l U c O r A. It's

a company that's also known as Infospace. In fact, it was originally called Infospace, but changed its name to Blue Cora in twelve after it bought another company called tax Act, and Infospace would become a business unit within the company. Infospace is the search company that has its own pretty checkered past that I'm not going to go into here because it doesn't really play into our episode about how stuff works. But how stuff works was sold off for

forty five million dollars. That represented an eighty two percent loss for Discovery Communications. Remember they spent two d fifty million years earlier, seven years earlier to buy it. Now all this is public knowledge, by the way, it's not time divulging secrets. It was a pretty rough time for some of us working at the company, or at the very least it was for me. I can't speak for everyone else, because we had gone from being part of a two fifty million dollar deal to seven years later

being sold off for forty five million dollars. Which hurt. We weren't really sure where we would fit in with blue Cora. The company was known for not just infospace but also for tax act you know, financial services, and blue Core had purchased that back in two thousand twelve. We assumed that our role would be to keep creating articles and podcasts, and for the most part, we operated in Atlanta just as we had before, and we were

still in Buckhead at that time. But then in two thousand fifteen, our office would move to its current location in Ponce City Market, in a part of Atlanta known as the Old Fourth Ward, much closer to where I live, which is nice for me. I can now walk to work at about the same amount of time it took me to take public transportation to our old office. I'm not really saving time, but I'm getting a lot more exercise.

Pont City Market used to be an old distribution center and storefront for Sears, and it's huge, with two million, one thousand square feet of space. When we moved in, the building was mostly under construction, and today you can walk around the first two floors of the market and visit all these different shops and restaurants. It's really cool. But when we moved in. All of that was just

bare concrete. In fact, it was a hard hat area, and we had a very narrow pathway we could take from the door to the bank of elevators we could use to get up to the floor that has our office on it. And I only mentioned this because if you listen to podcast episodes from around the summer of two thousand fifteen, you might occasionally hear the tell tale sounds of construction noises as the building was being prepared

for news stores and residents during that time. We were producing a lot more video content during this time of our history as well. Not only were we still doing brain Stuff and Forward Thinking Now, we were also producing videos for How Stuff Works Now, which was a or news oriented series. We also began to experiment with live streams, including How Stuff Works Now live streams and fun stuff like Snack Stuff, in which Lauren Vogel, Bob and Ben

Boland would eat unfamiliar snack foods live on camera. I showed up for a few of those. Those were typically streamed on Facebook, and we were starting to run ads on our podcasts at this time, and some shows were doing it pretty frequently. Stuff you should know obviously being

one of the flagship ones. The forward Thinking video series was sponsored, but other shows were generating revenue through the tried and true YouTube model, and of course we were still writing articles for the website, plus writing more short form material for the blog, like pages on how Stuff Works. Now. Meanwhile,

over at Blue Cora, things were changing. The company that had started off as Infospace was focusing more and more on financial services, like its tax Act business, and so the powers that be decided that the most logical thing to do would be to sell off the infospace business to someone else, and that How Stuff Works would go along with the deal. So in July two thousand sixteen, Blue Cora announced it had sold Infospace and How Stuff Works to a company called open Mail for forty five

million dollars. And yet again this was a bit of a downer. I mean, the last time How Stuff Works have been sold it was for forty five million dollars all by itself, and now the company was being bought along with another company at that same price. And I want to stress that during all these changes, my co workers were all striving to write and record the best stuff they could. The quality was never in question either

among the editorial staff, the video staff. Everybody was doing an amazing job, but it was really feeling pretty weird at this point, at least for me. I can't really speak for anyone else. On the bright side, open Mail was super nice to us. The company seemed determined to give us space to create and support what we needed.

Um so we were able to to try lots of different stuff, and by this time many podcasters myself included, would transition over to only researching, writing, and recording podcasts, not articles. It was really rare that I would write articles for the site after that point. The once in a blue moon I would still do it. The process of researching and writing an article for how Stuff Works

is sort of like doing a term paper. You have to be very thorough, you have to be informative, and you have to make sure you have reliable sources when you write it, and it takes a lot of time to put a good article together. The same truth with podcasts, and as we focused more on doing shows, we found ourselves with less time to devote to writing articles. So we started using more freelancers for that, and occasionally, like

I said, we would write an article ourselves. Open Mail would change its name to System One, but that was a tiny change compared to what was going to happen next. In August two thousand seventeen, the company announced it was going to spin off the podcasting part of How Stuff Works as its own independent company, which became known as

Stuff Media. The website part of the business, however, would remain with System One, and so our office was now made up of people working for two different companies, though there was still a ton of cross pollination. And it's a weird thing for me to think about at this point, because you know, I I started with How Stuff Works. I started with that company in two thousand seven. I had started as a staff writer. I worked my way

up to senior writer and then became a podcaster. But at that point, and by that point, I mean two thousand seventeen, I was part of something else. Stuff Media was a slightly different company, though we continued to inhabit the same office space for the time being anyway, but

it was clear things were changing. It was also clear that we'd start ramping up working on new shows before long, though at first we were really focused on just making sure we could foster the shows we had already been recording and give them the love and attention they needed. The spinoff of Stuff Media included a fifteen million dollar

investment from a company called The Rain Group. Kamal Byrne, who had led How Stuff Works for years before transitioning to Discovery Communications, returned to serve as president of the new media company. He's the guy responsible for getting us into podcasts, By the way, the hosts and producers owe a lot to him forgetting the ball rolling, particularly since we went for years without having a way to actually

generate revenue from the shows. I think a lot of leaders would have ditched the podcasts in favor of focusing on more short term goals. In fact, I know that's the case because I've seen it happen at other places. But we were able to keep things moving long enough for podcasting to become a viable industry in its own right. By this time we spun off from System One, we were ranked as the second largest podcast publisher behind NPR in terms of streams and downloads. But I'm not done

with our story just yet. I'll tell you more in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. The months went by and we continued producing podcasts. The website side continued doing their thing, and then in September two eighteen, it was announced that I Heart Media, the audio company formerly known as Clear Channel, was acquiring Stuff Media for the reported princely sum of fifty five million dollars.

By this stage, the stuff Media network consisted of about twenty five shows, and it was an interesting move in part because at the time, I heart Media was still restructuring under Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection, having accumulated a pretty gargantuan debt of around twenty billion dollars. I Heart Media was in the process of spinning off clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, which was its outdoor advertising business think like you know,

digital billboards and stuff like that. That process became complete in May two thousand nineteen. The acquisition received approval even as I heart Media continued to restructure its As for the company itself, it is the largest owner of radio stations in the United States. It owns more than eight hundred fifty stations. The company also produces and distributes many podcasts. The stuff Media podcast network was seen as a way to develop that further, and boy, howdy, have we been

producing a lot of new shows since then. We've launched numerous podcasts leading up to and following the move to I Heeart Media. Now you still have the flagship Stuff shows like Stuff you Know, stuff you missed in history class, brain Stuff, stuff Mom never told you, stuff they don't want you to know, and of course tech Stuff. I've heard rumors that at least one former Stuff show maybe on its way back very soon, but I'll share more

about that once it happens. Just wanted to seed a little excitement out there that something has coming down the pipeline now. In addition to the Stuff shows, we have tons of other shows that we're producing. Some of them are produced in house here in Atlanta, like Chuck Bryant's show Movie Crush, in which he sits down with various interesting people talks to them about their favorite films, sort

of a launching point for a conversation. We have Savor, which was formerly known as food Stuff, that has hosts Lauren and Annie, and they're amazing. They just got back from uh uh incredible trip to Hawaii where I understand they talked to almost twenty different people in in interviews, so that's amazing. We have the Monster series that's a collaboration with Tinderfoot Studios, and it focuses on serial killers. The first season was about the Atlanta child murders of

the early nineteen eighties. The second season was about the Zodiac Killer. We have committed a show about relationships that has some truly remarkable stories in it. Oh and I do a show called The Brink with my friend Ariel Caston where we talk about make or break moments in business. And there are several others, and it's just a small sample of the shows we're doing here in Atlanta. We also have tons being produced in New York, d C.

Los Angeles and other places. There's the Daily Zeitgeist, Culture Kings, Cabinet of Curiosities, Ask a Manager, Broken Hearts, Dressed Ethnically, Ambiguous, Happy Face, and more. We've got a ton of shows and development at various stages, and the process is an interesting one. So I guess I'm gonna in this episode by kind of going through what we do behind the scenes when we want to develop a podcast. So it

all starts with an idea. Frequently the ideas being pitched by a person who plans on being involved in the show in some capacity, either as a producer or a host or sometimes both. The idea is fleshed out and typically shared with several others in the company to make sure it sounds like a sustainable podcast that's worthy of the time and attention that will need to succeed because

it does take a lot of time. You're talking about dedicating time to record, to edit, published, so we want to make sure that the ideas sound pretty good before we start committing resources to them. This idea would then enter into the pitch process, and we have our shows

organized by what we call verticals. You could think of them sort of like categories, but the categories aren't hard and fast, as some shows overlap different categories, or one vertical might have shows that you might imagine would fit in a different category, but they act as general guidelines. At the head of each vertical, you have an executive producer who's in charge of overseeing the development and deployment of podcasts, as well as someone who remains keyed in

on how podcasts are doing. You also have a supervising producer that's someone who's on the technical side of things and is helping making sure that all the stuff can actually be done. During the pitch process, a show might go through some changes, and some of them can be really dramatic. Something give me relatively minor. Some shows require a lot of production. They might have interviews that requires scheduling.

It's a whole nightmare. If I were doing an interview based show, I would probably need a lot of help because just scheduling that kind of stuff is super tricky. My hat is off to all the people who do incredible interview based shows on our network. Um it is an amazing amount of work. But you also have stuff like transitions, you have music, you've got soundscaping and more. But then you have other types of shows like tech stuff. Those are pretty easy from a production standpoint. Those shows

still have some of those elements. Occasionally I might do an interview. We do have music, but there's not a whole lot of bells and whistles attached to a tech stuff episode that not nearly to the extent of a highly produced show. Highly produced shows can be flashy. They can generate a lot of buzz, and if the show is good, it can easily justify the extra work needed

to produce the podcast. But if it's a highly produced show and it's not doing well, it's probably not going to be around for very long, because it also is a very visible drain on resources. So the head of the verticals choose which show pitches are going to move forward in the process, and this can get a bit brutal. You might have a potential slate of a dozen brilliant ideas, but you might only have the capacity to launch let's say,

two of them per quarter. On the one hand, it's great to have the luxury of choice between lots of fantastic ideas. On the other it stinks to have to say, you know, we can't do this show, at least not yet, but there are only so many hours in the day, and we have to be strategic in which shows get the green light. From that point, the show runners, which might include writers, producers, and hosts, and some people might be wearing multiple hats for a single show, they'll go

off and they'll develop the idea further. Typically they'll record a pilot episode. The purpose of the pilot has given idea to the production team about what the finished show is going to be like, and it may or may not ever be published. That's meant to be sort of a prototype for the podcast itself, and frequently upon listening to a pilot, Executive, producers and others might have a

few notes. These are typically suggestions for changes to the show, and the notes might include format issues or a question about the voice of the show. It might be questions about who is the intended audience and do you think this show is speaking to that intended audience. It might just be a note that says this is great, but it needs to be twenty minutes shorter. I get that note a lot, mostly from tari. Typically the show runners will then take those notes and then make another pass

at it before they will start producing episodes. In earnest, when it becomes clear that we're going to launch the show, when everything's set, when we said, all right, we know what it is, we know what sounds like, We're ready to go, We're ready to start producing. These other factors also have to come into play. We have to secure u r L s for each show as well as social media accounts. We have to create logos for the shows. We have to assign a show to a marketing team.

The sales team also has to be keyed into the launch of new shows. We've got to make sure the publishing pipeline from back end to the end user is ready to go. All this has to be done far enough in advance so that when it comes time to publish the trailer, everything's already in place, and typically that's

how we start. We record a trailer that explains what the show is about, and will frequently PLoP that trailer into the feeds of other shows on the network, which I'm sure you've heard if you've been subscribed to any of our podcast for any real length of time. This sort of cross promotion can be incredibly useful, particularly since we're producing a lot of shows that complement one another.

So if you listen to tech Stuff and you like it, you're probably gonna like Sleepwalkers, which is why we will run a trailer for Sleepwalkers on the Tech Stuff feed. It's not just to promote the show. It's to say, I know, you guys like this stuff, this is something else you might really dig. You should check it out.

And upon publication, we typically have a couple of episodes ready to download straight away, so instead of just publishing episode one, will have maybe episodes one and two, and that way listeners can check out more than a single episode right from the start. We want listeners to have a good idea of what a show is going to be like, so they can make that determination about whether or not they want to subscribe to the podcast. In

some cases, they may not. They may say, well, i've listened to too and I don't know, it's just not appealing to me. That's totally valid. But if you listen to and you say, man, I really like this, and that's a good indication that you know you should subscribe to that show. Sometimes shows get a strong following and they grow from there. Other times shows might take a while before they catch on. Some shows might never get

much attention at all. Producers sometimes have to decide to end a show if it has a small audience and the time being spent producing the show could be, you know, better used elsewhere. But it's a tough call. There are lots of other factors that can also affect the end result. For example, a show might have a small but loyal following and advertisers might just love that show, and in those cases you might say, well, let's keep it going and keep trying to grow this audience. Because it's got

a lot of support behind it. It doesn't make sense to just end it. But if a show isn't getting much traction, and if you can't sell ads for it, it's probably not going to be around very long. This also gets a bit more complicated when you talk about the differences between ongoing shows like Tech Stuff, ones that published every week, and then shows that are divided up

into seasons. With seasons, you tend to get a pretty big bump and subscribers when a show generates some buzz when it first premieres, but you're not likely to keep adding at that same pace when you are between seasons,

so that affects things a bit. On the flip side, for a show like Tech Stuff that's been running for years, you're not likely to see a big bump in numbers unless one of my episodes gets mentioned on some larger outlet, or if I land a killer interview with someone important that a lot of people want to hear more about. And there are a lot of other moving parts to a podcast network. The marketing team is constantly finding ways to promote shows and to get them to a wider audience.

The social media team works hard to reach out to our communities and keep them engaged. The sales team is responsible for landing all those ad deals that pay the bills and allow us to actually make these shows. And while we're supporting all the shows that are already out there, we're always in the process of making more. Meanwhile, my former co workers are on the website side are no longer in our office, though they aren't far away. There

are a couple of floors above us. Now. They still produce content for the website and they do an incredible job with it. If you haven't been to How Stuff Works in a while, or even if you've never been there, I encourage you to check it out. They are producing fantastic articles and videos, and they are genuinely great people and I miss seeing them every day. I'm very fortunate to have so many cool folks working on the Stuff

Media I Heart side. We keep adding new people as we focus on making existing shows better and bringing new shows to you guys. It's an exciting time for us. We've received a lot of love from the I Heart Media side. Now, as I record this, it's nearly on the eleventh anniversary of Text Stuff's launch, it's actually just past it. So it's pretty amazing that this podcast has been through so many changes. You know, what it really

tells me is that you guys are incredible. I have incredible listeners, because without you, this show would have gotten the acts a dozen times over. We've had format changes, we've had host changes, We've gone through ownership changes more times than I can count, and you guys have remained constant. And that is the reason why I'm still doing this show. So thank you all for listening. I greatly appreciate it.

And that wraps up this episode about how Stuff Works, and uh, and you know how things are going now that we're a podcast network arm of I Heart Media. I am excited to see where things go from here. It has in a pretty amazing experience so far, one that I think it's been more positive than anything else.

I've had a lot of opportunities to talk to some really smart people in the mass communications world, and it's nice to get some validation that some of the things I've been doing have been right all along, and it's great to get guidance on how I can do other stuff better. So I consider that a positive experience overall. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Or you can drop

me a line on social media. Just go on over to tech stuff podcast dot com that has links to the social media presence, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes and more information about yours truly if for some reason you've gotta know more. Plus there's a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's

How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.