Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of The Origin Rob.

This is a special New Year's Day podcast last year I did this I did kind of a year in review where I look back on the on the previous year and look forward to what we can expect for the forthcoming year so I want to do that again for this year so I want to look back on 2022

which had a lot of exciting stuff happen on the podcast and also look forward to 2023 got a bunch of notes in front of me some stats some reviews some random thoughts so hopefully this will not come out to disjointedly let me begin with the theology in the raw mission statement that I developed last year last December I remember thinking about doing this kind of year in review and given an overview of the all general looking forward to the forthcoming year and I was like I don't even

I don't even know like what my mission is for this podcast I thought I feel like I did it was in me was kind of like in my bones I kind of knew it intuitively what I was trying to do but I I didn't have like a really clear cut mission statement like what am I really trying to accomplish here on the podcast what is this podcast all about and so I came up with one and I'm going to and you know I was wondering if I was going to change it or tweak it over the year you know sometimes you come up with something a mission statement and let you know a couple months later like let's edit this and a couple months later you're like let's edit it again and

three months later four months later you're like let's ditch it and rewrite it and come up something new I actually still love this mission statement so here it is the theologian raw podcast aims to help believers think Christian Lee about theological and cultural issues by engaging in curious conversations with a diverse range of thoughtful people I don't think I want to change a word of that I think that captures what I've been doing and what I enjoy doing and what I will continue for the foreseeable future to continue to try to do the same

as I was trying to do this is you know we don't I don't always have Christians on the podcast but my ultimate goal is more believers focused gets more under the broad umbrella of discipleship it's not like evangelistic per se although I guess it can I think discipleship and evangelism can overlap quite a bit to think Christian Lee about theological and cultural issues. I tried to keep those in balance I'm going to talk more about that in a little bit you know try to do some podcast episodes of the podcast.

Podcasts episodes that are really just hardcore biblical studies or engaging in a theological topic other ones are much more cultural that balance I'm going to try to maintain that balance engaging and I guess this is probably the most maybe important not important but I mean more maybe unique part of the mission is engaging in curious conversations with a diverse range of thoughtful people and I think that's where some people that have a love hate relationship with the podcast or maybe just a hate relationship with the podcast I think it's that point that can throw it away.

This is not this podcast is more like a conversation with a neighbor rather than a sermon from a stage and I know we're trying to figure out like what is a role of podcast in Christian discipleship what is an ecclesiology of podcasting in terms of like having conversations with people I don't think this is the only way to do it I think even the podcast platform can be used in many different ways to engage people's discipleship journey.

So I don't want to prioritize having curious conversations with the diverse range of thought people that's like this is the best way or only way to do it this is just a way that I enjoy using the podcast platform so I'm going to stick with it I really love not love like oh look how amazing my mission statement is but I think it really it captures in a really clarifying way what I have just kind of naturally been doing on the podcast over the years and what I really want to continue to do so let me share some stats with you I don't.

I'm not a huge stat person I don't check the podcast stats very often but I know some people like to kind of know numbers so for the for those of you who are numbers people and I contacted one of my producers and said hey can you just give me a report on this year's stats okay so here's a few highlights in 2022 we had over four million downloads and I don't that sounds big and maybe it is I just I don't have nothing to compare it to so I it is what it is we had over a form of.

4 million downloads so that means the average monthly downloads came in around 350,000 a month we released over a hundred brand new episodes in this last year and each episode average roughly 25,000 downloads in the first 30 days of release.

The YouTube channel in 2020 right when COVID was really hitting us hard I started or I think I already had one I like resurrected my old YouTube channel and tried to post regularly on YouTube and you know I was told like yeah YouTube's where it's at you got to get on YouTube you got to be consistent and I was really consistent posted stuff that I was just doing it all on my own and it never really kind of took off like I feel like it's put all this time in energy with minimal pay off.

The podcast as opposed to the YouTube continued to get way way more I guess listeners but some people are I mean a lot of people are YouTube only people and so I said you know what I'm not I'm going to stop trying to like be an expert on YouTube so I was doing all this like filming stuff and like I'm just not this is not my world and I was spending you know we all had maybe more time during COVID and I was like spending hours and hours trying to like get better YouTube and it just didn't really work so.

But okay I'll come back to this in a second but we this year one of the highlights of the odds we ended up hiring like a professional company to help produce it and I don't think like sleazy institutional company or whatever like this is a group of awesome Christian people who already love the podcast they resonate with it they have great either hit real hands off to like hey you just keep doing what you're doing we want to help produce it well and get the word out and so they also took over the YouTube channel so basically now the

they they upload all the videos like the day that a podcast is released on the pod day a podcast episode is released they also upload the YouTube video version of that podcast so I mean some of you might not even know that there is a whole

everything on the podcast is also on on YouTube and they create the thumbnails they do they kind of promote it and everything so yeah the YouTube channel now now that I've given it up now that somebody else is doing it for me it's actually a pretty well oiled machine so YouTube

let's see received in 2022 over 416,000 views 7 million total impressions and 65% of the podcast views came from YouTube recommending the video to other viewers so I got that's good so so some YouTubers are coming across a podcast coming across the

channel general and then are being pushed over to the podcast to listen to it so that's great but I don't I mean when I look at stats on YouTube like I'll you know I'll see some guy like

changing as alternator you know in the camera angles just horrible and it's just totally not a professional video and it has like a half a million views or something you know so I don't I mean these

YouTube stats still seem pretty dismal in a sense I can really care less I'm glad it's serving the people that prefer YouTube over podcasting over listening or whatever so yeah I'm glad it's up

there according to YouTube check this out the audience by YouTube audience is 57% female and the largest age bracket is 25 to 34 years old at 22.3% of the viewers on YouTube so

that's kind of cool because typically male podcasters have a largely male audience and vice versa for females I think I think that's pretty true so that's pretty cool I'm glad that there are more female not not that it matters but I'm glad it's not like 80% men and 20% women viewing the YouTube channel the podcast continues to hover in the top 50

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