Once Upon a Time, there was a podcast
A parable about podcasting and bureaucracy
Once upon a time, there was a podcast. It was the passion project of three software engineers working at Big Company. They took it on as a personal effort, outside of their normal jobs, and tried to avoid the overhead of normal company process and bureaucracy.
The trio recorded an initial episode and submitted it for internal approval, in keeping with their only policy and slogan for the show: Don’t Get Fired.
Big Company said NO, with the reasoning that allowing random engineers and their guests to publish conversations in public invited only risk, with no tangible upside.
The engineers went back to work, saddened, but not completely surprised, having worked at big companies for many years. But they continued to lobby for the show internally until finally, one year later, they were granted permission to proceed, with several stipulations. For example, all topics needed to be pre-reviewed and sessions would be recorded and personally supervised by People Who Know Better.
The engineers agreed, since they knew which topics would be appropriate. Besides, they never had any intention of doing anything controversial to begin with; they just wanted to talk tech with other engineers. They soon discovered, to their complete satisfaction, that nobody wanted to waste their time sitting in on or listening to these sessions anyway, so they were soon handling all details of recording and posting, as originally intended.
Persistence and time are powerful weapons in any bureaucracy.
This grass-roots approach continued for several years. The hosts recorded in any available space, interviewed colleagues they could beg time from, and posted the recordings on an official Big Company feed and website. The project took very little time and effort apart from simply recording and posting each episode. One of the hosts sanity-checked each recording, wrote a blurb, and posted it. There was rarely any editing required or performed; most episodes needed only the intro/outro jingles (also created by the hosts) tacked on. The cost for any given episode was therefore quite low: about an hour of time for the hosts and guest(s), plus another hour for whichever host took on the job of posting that week. All of this time was outside of everyone’s real job, so the entire podcast was essentially free.
Several years later, when Big Company noticed the podcast and saw that it was doing well in its domain, they offered a studio space and an audio engineer to record the sessions, which enhanced the quality. The podcast now took the same amount of time and cost for the hosts and their guests, plus the time from the audio technician to record it and the space in the studio where recording took place.
A few months later, Big Company purchased better microphones and recording equipment which improved the quality of the sound from the admittedly amateur efforts of the hosts. Now every session was recorded in a sound-dampened studio, by a trained professional, with quality equipment. The per-episode cost was still relatively cheap since the hosts were still editing and posting, but the show now also required time from the audio engineer and studio, plus the cost of the fancy new equipment.
A few months after the hardware upgrade, Big Company offered to also take over the job of editing and posting. They hired an external vendor—an expert in audio editing—to listen to the recording, delete errors, trim awkward silences, and generally make a higher-quality experience for the growing audience of listeners. The hosts were able to dial back their time investment to just the time it took to record an episode and write a blurb. But the overall show costs continued to grow, as Big Company now paid for the facilities and recording engineer, plus the new editing vendor. Also, a producer now entered the picture, because multiple people and more complex logistics were involved, so someone obviously needed to oversee and manage the process.
Eventually, the video studio where the podcast recording happened was shut down as the media department moved to a different campus several miles away. In its place, Big Company offered a brand new studio, custom built specifically for podcast recording. The hosts and guests enjoyed an upgraded recording experience, the audience enjoyed a higher-quality listening experience, and Big Company enjoyed the increased cost of new, dedicated facilities along with the team managing those facilities. The cost per episode was similar to what it was in the previous studio (though the hosts and guest(s) now added the time to commute to and from the new recording facility), but now there was also the hidden cost of the brand new facilities.
A few months later, Big Company pointed out that many podcasts are now published as videos, and suggested that the team should record and post a video of the regular podcast. The hosts thought this idea was ridiculous — who would want to watch a video of a conversation? But they tried it and had to admit they were wrong. The podcast gained many new listeners (viewers), as many people who had not listened to the previously audio-only podcast began to watch it online.
The videos added complexity, of course, as each episode was recorded by multiple cameras and edited together. The per-episode cost ballooned, as it now encompassed the usual costs of recording, editing, and producing the audio, along with the purchase cost of the new video equipment and the new work of recording, editing, producing, and posting the video version. Each episode took the same amount of travel + recording time from the hosts and guests as before. But now there was a team of at least three people (techs and producers) involved behind the scenes to handle the rest of the recording and posting process. Meanwhile, the cost of editing increased since there was now video and audio work to be done.
This situation proceeded along for a couple of years. Every month or so, the hosts would scramble at the last minute to figure out a topic and guest(s), gather in the fancy podcasting studio, and record an episode. The production team would take it from there and the episode would magically appear online a couple of weeks later.
Then Big Company went through a round of budget adjustments, as all big companies do. The hosts were told that the podcast was very expensive to produce, given the size of the team involved in addition to the dedicated recording space and equipment. So perhaps the monthly podcast should scale back to just once or twice per quarter. The hosts agreed and the podcast therefore posts less frequently than it used to.
To this day, the podcast still exists. But every month, the hosts wonder whether that month’s episode will be cut from the schedule to save Big Company’s money, or whether the show will just be canceled outright. Because, after all, this is content which has no tangible revenue possibility and which is demonstrably expensive to create and produce. And it is completely optional content. Content which, in its original form, was basically free. So the podcast episodes are no longer as frequent, because Big Company, by its own decisions, made each episode so costly that it eventually caused the podcast to be too expensive to produce.
The moral of this story is…. nonexistent. Every step along the way was logical, leading inexorably from a cheap and easy piece of regular content to a highly-produced, expensive, and ultimately unsustainable outcome.
This podcast parable is just one example of a larger phenomenon in big companies, where projects often get bureaucratized to death. A grass-roots project takes off and attracts internal notice. So a person is assigned to help out. This person becomes a team, and that team necessitates management, project, and process overhead. The amount of resources, equipment, and people expands infinitely, until one day the big company notices that it costs far more than it is worth, so it is shut down. This dynamic plays out over and over in our industry (and perhaps in all industries), from failed acquisitions to products that would have been hugely profitable in a small company being shuttered because they don’t make sense at big company scale. It’s business entropy.
At least in this case (so far), the fictional podcast is allowed to continue, albeit at a diminished pace. Perhaps this is a good place to insert a favorite movie line…
I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.
… and then to pray.
The next time you wonder why a favorite project of yours has been canceled or throttled down to a slower cadence, ask yourself: Is it being produced by a big company? How much might it actually cost under the covers simply because a big company is doing the self-imposed heavy lifting? And is the big company putting on the brakes just because they forced it to grow to an unsustainably expensive size?
THE END.
