SpaceVidcast.com started with around 250 live viewers, skyrocketed to 450 and held there for a while. Then the stream crashed and we were back down to 200 viewers. From there the viewership has been steadily declining until at the writing of this post we’re under 100 live viewers (83 to be exact).
I was expecting about 20 to 40 live viewers of the launch and about 5 live viewers during the down times, so 100 viewers is still well above my expectations. I had a feeling, and apparently a correct one, that people would get bored after the launch and start to bail. While space flight is the future of humanity it oddly has a very inhuman face. This creates a problem for viewership as people want a human connection and NASA TV simply does not offer that.
The solution is painfully simple yet quite complex. I have 1/2 of it online now by burning a chat room directly in to the video stream. The other half comes in the form of actually getting on camera and talking with people live, interacting with them. The trick here is timing. I have a full time time (well over 40 hours a week) and that makes it hard to squeeze in time to broadcast and get people excited about this stuff.
There are other ways to draw an audience as well. This show has zero marketing right now. I’m streaming simply to see if it can be done and to learn for my weekly show. I’ll be advertising for the weekly show so I expect/hope viewership will be higher for that. I’ll also try and get more compelling content over each show to keep people interested and excited. I think with all of these things we’ll have a winning combination.
So why do I care about viewership of a re-broadcast of NASA TV? I’m not even producing the show! I’m hoping to get NASA and space flight in front of people who have never really been interested in it before or are a little interested but simply never vested the time. These people don’t go to NASA.gov and look for the live steam. These people don’t go out of their way to learn this stuff, they stumble across it and if it interests them they stay. That means that the more viewers I have the more interested people we were able to bring in. The more that drop off, the more bored they get. Viewers are finicky and won’t come back if they get too bored too often. Thus, I need to be careful here. I went a little twitter happy these last few days, so I think it is time to scale it all back a touch before the huge events like landing occur and we do our first weekly show.
All in all this has been a great experiment. I’m happy with how it turned out and while I’m sad the viewership is declining I’m a little happy that my theories on how viewership would start to decline rapidly were correct. I’m ecstatic that the viewership scale was so much higher than anticipated. For a show that I figured would be a fun side hobby, this may turn in to a venture worth something. That’s great news as advertising can get spend-y.
For now the really high viewership has come to an end. I expect it to climb back around 200 to 250 during the days and under 100 at night. 450+ was fun while it lasted, but I’ll need to put a human face on NASA before I’ll be able to get back to 450 let alone the 1,000+ that I really want. So far we have had over 25,000 views of the stream, so not too shabby for something I was not quite prepared to do.
