I’m very sad that Hypercritical ends. Siracusa was a podcast making machine, always great at picking out interesting topics, always great at explaining and finding the right analogies. Sure, not all episodes were always genius (as is bound to happen with a weekly podcast), but it’s not like that has happened more often recently.

I’m not really at all in tune with American pop culture, so his appearances on The Incomparable are sadly not as interesting to me.

I’m guessing doing an interesting podcast week after week is just hard and he wants a break?

Given the amount of prep he does for each show I imagine it's very time-consuming, so if that's the reason it's understandable why he wants to stop. However, it's not as though he has to either podcast every week or not at all - he could release every other week or once a month or something, and I for one would rather have that than nothing at all.

According to Dan, Siracusa will make appearances in the new show called "The Crossover" (http://5by5.tv/crossover), aleit irregularly. All is not lost for Hypercritical listeners.

The problem I foresee is that, by its very nature, The Crossover is intended to have on multiple hosts from other shows, and as such it's likely that he would have to share the episode with people other than Dan. While this could work for some things, I don't think it would work as well for subjects where he has deep, complex opinions or observations that he needs to impart without interruption. Still, I'll take what I can get.

Very true. I'll miss the Siracusian-length rants.

Random question but I've always wondered this: I don't yet understand the market for 1.5+ hour weekly podcasts like some of 5by5's. Do listeners generally have long commutes or even listen during work? Do listeners generally only listen to 1 podcast a week?

I'm intrigued because I listen to a few far shorter podcasts each week but would find even a single 2 hour episode almost impossible to get through on my schedule.

You might have very atypical media use. I fit podcasts in by replacing other media use.

I was just looking at media use data in Germany† and people spend tons of time using different media: 242 minutes of TV (that’s four hours!), 191 minutes of radio, 83 minutes on the Internet, 23 minutes reading newspapers, 31 minutes listening to audio recordings, 22 minutes reading books and 6 minutes reading magazines. That’s minutes per day (numbers from 2012, Van Eimeren, Frees 2012).

Those who are younger (14–29) use media a bit less – but still quite a lot: 138 minutes TV, 146 minutes radio, 150 minutes Internet, 10 minutes newspapers, 72 minutes audio recordings, 30 minutes books and 4 minutes magazines.

So if people just forgo a little bit of TV use they will easily be able to fit in a weekly 1.5 hour podcast. If you look at the time when people use different media (radio use peaks in the morning at 7, probably when people are in the bathroom or on the way to work, TV use massively peaks around 8 in the evening, Internet use is pretty evenly spread throughout the day) you can also see that radio use is also a prime candidate for replacement by podcasts.

By the way, the data I was looking at can tell you very little about how people use podcasts, because in the general population very few do. Only two percent use audio podcasts at least once weekly.

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† I’m sorry, but I’m too lazy to look up numbers for the US right now. The paper with the data from Germany is the one I have handy. As far as I remember the details of US media use are different but they are broadly similar (as would be expected for two similarly developed countries).

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Source: Van Eimeren, Birgit; Frees, Beate (2012): 76 Prozent der Deutschen online – neue Nutzungssituationen durch mobile Endgeräte. In: Media Perspektiven 7–8/2012 (p. 362–379).

Just wanted to thank all of your for your responses - this is very enlightening!

I can't listen to speech while doing something else (other than driving or sleeping) so that probably limits my opportunities time-wise.

I mentioned this in the other thread about Build and Analyze, but I listen to ~ 40 hours of podcasts a week.

I listen to them mostly when I get home from work (maybe 3 or 4 hours a night), and then usually a bunch of marathon sessions on the weekend.

It's easy for me to find myself overwhelmed by the number of ones that I subscribe to (particularly if I manage to miss a couple days straight, and then suddenly have a big pile of unlistened to shows), so I'll periodically go through and unsubscribe from the ones that I don't seem to make time for.

I'd say the ones I listen to are about 50/50 comedy podcasts and tech-related.

It sounds like I'll soon have ~3.5 hours less per week to listen to (as I subscribe to both Build and Analyze and Hypercritical).

Wow! That's pretty epic - thanks for sharing. Given you are as close to a hardcore podcast listener as I currently know, how do you judge which tech podcasts to listen to?

I've found it hard work with the 1-2 hour long ones since the beginnings tend to drag and I can only give them five minutes before getting bored and turning off.

They fit in while doing other tasks. For me: cooking, driving and exercising. I only have a ten minute commute, but cooking twice a day and exercising add quite a bit of time.

I also listen to them at faster speeds. People generally talk slowly, and listening at 1.5x or 2x isn't much faster than most people read, so they can still be understood easily (and after an initial adjustment they no longer 'feel' fast). A ten minute commute, listening at 2x, will consume 40 minutes of podcast per day alone.

I listen to 2-hour episodes in multiple parts. That is, I have a commute of about 40 minutes per day, so I just listen to one episode over four days.

Sometimes, this leads to having a few new episodes in my queue, but the nice side-effect of that is that I almost all the time have something to listen to, if I want to :-).