The long climb of an obsession on quality

I’ve mentioned the excellent “ Acquired” podcast on here a few times (including learning as leverage and average advice), as it’s a fantastic show. I’m relatively new to it, but over the last year or so there are a lot of people that are new to it. Case in point, here is their growth over the past nine years:

There are a few things to take away from this, the biggest being that slow climb. Looking at 2016–2019, four years worth of shows, the climb was very minimal. They put a ton of work into every episode, and the results took a long time to arrive.

Cal Newport recently wrote a great article unpacking their show and had a few fascinating statements. The first is related to the challenges of an audience as large as theirs is now:

The show now serves more than 200,000 downloads per episode and they now face the problem of their audience becoming too large for their advertisers to afford paying the full fair market price for their spots.

He also explains why the growth has been so impressive the last few years:

What does explain the success of Acquired? The answer is almost disappointingly simple: it’s really good. Gilbert and Rosenthal don’t just look into the histories of the companies they profile, they master them — tracking down obscure books, reading every relevant…