A Survey of Hype in Web Development Podcasts

I listen to quite a few web dev podcasts. Something that irks me about a lot of them, is how much they tend to hype their own shows, products or the like. Sure, they’re allowed to, it is their own podcast after all, often from their own businesses etc. I’m fully aware this all possibly contributes toward the success of shows, but it annoys me nonetheless.

One of these things is the title of the show itself. I don’t really get why its necessary to repeat the title (Sure I do really, to drum it into my head), given it’s going to be within the title of the mp3. I know what I’m listening to after all, because my favourite media player tells me.

I’ve been wanting to count the number of times a show utters it’s name over its duration. Sure, I realise this is somewhat ocd and geeky, but hey. Here’s my results for a typical set of podcasts that I often listen to in a week. I’ve linked up the data I’ve used to create this chart on google spreadsheets, for anyone else who may be interested to contribute to and build upon further. I gathered the data all myself by listening to each podcast and counting when mentions of the show were made but it may be a good excuse for me to experiment with amazon turk.

The big web show comes out tops with one mention over 40 mins worth of show and boagworld comes last with 24 mentions of the show over its duration. (It’s unfortunate for boagworld that its theme tune includes a voice repeating the title in the theme. I did originally include echos, which would be 34 mentions, but my colleagues inform me this may be taking the experiment a little too far :))

I plan to do the same for product mentions (adverts I guess) in a weeks worth of (different) episodes, but if anyone wants to go ahead and update with their own findings that would be great.