Hi there!
This is the 57th full month (4 years and 9 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.
What’s new?
1) “Audience of this podcast”
We aggregate listen stats on Listen Notes, and we launched Listen Real-time a few years ago based on such stats.
Recently, we make the aggregated audience geo data public for individual podcasts. You can find such stats on a podcast page’s “Audience of this podcast” card - See example:
Two caveats:
Currently, only a small portion of podcasts have such “Audience of this podcast” card, because a big portion of podcasts don’t get any listens on Listen Notes (or on all the other platforms in general).
The podcast ecosystem is fragmented. People use different clients to listen to podcasts. Therefore, please consider listen stats on Listen Notes as a small sample size of the entire podcast industry.
2) “Report inappropriate content”
Productize the “report inappropriate content” flow:
https://www.listennotes.com/report-content/
3) Upgraded Elasticsearch from 7.15 to 8.20
Typically we do big upgrades for infrastructure software (e.g., Elasticsearch, Postgres, Ubuntu, Django…) once every 18 months ~ 24 months or so.
We upgraded Elasticsearch from 7.6 to 7.15 last November. We shouldn’t have updated to a new version now (~7 months). However, this time is different -
ansible-elasticsearch won’t support newer version of Elasticsearch (i.e., 8.0+) any more. This means that we have to rewrite our Ansible provision scripts next time when we’ll upgrade to a newer version of Elasticsearch. Based on our experience, we’d better rewrite the provision scripts sooner rather than later, otherwise, it may become a disaster if there’s an outage, AND we have to rewrite the provision scripts, AND re-provision our Elasticsearch cluster at the same time.
New features of 8.0+ look appealing! We (as a service provider) want to be like good chefs, who always use the best ingredients to cook & serve our customers :)
So, we rewrote our Ansible provision scripts for Elasticsearch, and re-provisioned our Elasticsearch cluster (upgraded from 7.15 to 8.20).
4) “Enterprise-ready”
Enterprise sales is… tedious. We had to do a bunch of “Enterprise-ready” things. And every month, there will be 10+ new edge cases that can’t be solved by software & automation. But it’s a good problem to have.
5) New blog post: “Instead of Monthly Billing, a Daily Alternative for SaaS“
https://www.listennotes.com/blog/instead-of-monthly-billing-a-daily-alternative-48/
Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)