Search Engine in 2025

A little about the past, some news about the future. (Also, two more days to buy merch.)

Before I start, I wanted to let people know that we’re about to close our flash sale on merch. Thanks to the many people who sent in their orders, we’ve received about 500 so far! And thanks for your patience with the bugs and hiccups as we send out physical goods for the first time.

If you still want to pick up a hoodie or a t-shirt, we’re accepting orders until the end of the day this Friday, April 18. (These are all being hand-printed as a single batch, not printed on demand.)

Hi!

Some things are changing at Search Engine, and I wanted to write to you about what we’re up to.

We’re entering, right now, what I think of as Search Engine’s second chapter. The show is about two years old, and financially, we’re out of the red.

I don’t know how to explain what a huge relief this is. The fluttering engine in my chest is this conviction that I deeply owe it to a bunch of strangers to regularly send them a podcast that doesn’t disappoint them. And the biggest disappointment would be if the show itself had to prematurely end. Working with Sruthi and the rest of our small team to keep Search Engine alive and to make sure it’s always improving preoccupies me. There’s not a level of exaggeration that can capture how many waking hours I spend thinking about this, or forcing my beleaguered friends to talk through it with me. (Sorry friends.)

So it is a colossal relief to be reaching this first mountaintop of basic fiscal health for our show. And to be here, frankly, a little quicker than we’d allowed ourselves to hope.

There’s a few reasons why our expectations were too conservative. One is that the show has grown a little faster than we expected. We’re not a big show, we just have gotten to medium-sized at a nice clip. We’ve also found revenue in places we hadn’t imagined. The biggest place has been listener subscriptions to Incognito Mode, which, to be frank, I believe saved the show in its first year. (The other revenue has come from more marginal places that helped at the edges – some custom ad spots we sold for some bigger brands.)

This is all, of course, great. And it’s giving us not just oxygen, but also some flexibility. Which is why we’re making a choice that’s going to cost us money in the short term but be good for the show in the long-term. We’re going to slightly reduce our publishing cadence.

A new cadence

Search Engine will still publish pretty frequently, about two to three times a month. (In our first two years, we would frequently go four, five, or more weeks in a row without a break).

We’re doing this, in part, to preserve the well-being of the people working here. We are a team of three full-time members, and we want to make sure we have time to rest and live our non-work lives. But the change is also designed to allow us to more easefully keep improving the quality of the show itself. Publishing a little less frequently gives us more production hours to spend on our episodes. We can pursue more complicated, ambitious, or risky stories when they appear.

I think it’ll be good for us, I know it’ll be good for the show, and I know it’ll be good for our listeners. But like every choice, it’s risky. We’re voluntarily burning some revenue, and the show isn’t flush.

We’re going to try to hedge that risk by running a few more reruns and continuing to share episodes of other shows. The reruns give us some more revenue, the episode shares offer both ad revenue and, if we do a share exchange with a show, a chance to grow our audience. But we’re also going to be mindful about not hitting our own feed too frequently with material that’s not new episodes of Search Engine. Like everything, this will be a balancing act, and we’ll tune things as we go.

The show itself will still be a hybrid (some reported pieces, some pretty straight interviews, and pieces that blend the two). And, my hope is that this year, we’ll keep finding exciting new voices to showcase, people besides me who have questions and curiosity and the ability to run down answers.

Looking back at Reply All

I recently spoke recently to Peter Kafka about our show on his podcast, Channels, and about how building a show in podcasting’s lean era compares to having built another one, Reply All, in podcast’s moneyed era. You can listen here if you’d like.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat it. As much as this moment in podcasting can be more frightening, I continue to notice how much about it I prefer. When I helped build Reply All, my relationship to the work I was committing my time to was just very different.

I’ve never really talked about what I actually did at Reply All, and people sometimes ask.

Officially, I was one of the show’s hosts and one of its editors. What that actually meant was that I generated lots of the episode ideas. And, while I was still there, I also wrote much of the show’s scripted stories. I also, alongside Tim Howard, line-edited the show’s conversational stories.

I also invented some new formats for the show, like Yes Yes No and Super Tech Support (the latter inspired, actually, by this and this).

A too long way of saying that my role back then was mostly editorial.

The business of the show was largely the responsibility of Gimlet, the company that published Reply All. Which meant that while sometimes I felt like the show’s leader, at other times I felt like a corporate middle manager, or, a Gimlet employee, or, frequently, I just felt like I was annoying podcast show business talent (my bosses would agree). All of it ended up creating, for me, a confusing relationship to the show itself.

These days, there’s a cleanness to our independent production and tiny team that I really appreciate. The good choices and the bad choices are entirely ours. If slowing cadence turns out to be the right choice, Sruthi and I get to own it. If it’s a mistake, we get to learn from it. There’s nobody to blame. This arrangement isn’t for everybody, but if you’re someone who suspects something like this might be for you, I’d suggest that the freedom can be worth the fear.

Community

One last bit of housekeeping. You might have noticed that I haven’t been sending out emails with each episode. My feeling was that they take up time I want to spend on the show itself. But we’re going to resume posting small pages for the episodes on Substack, I’m just not going to write anything long there. Think of them as extended show notes, mainly there as a place for people to comment on episodes if they choose.

And occasionally, I’ll use our Substack the way I’m using it today. For whatever longer thoughts I can get my editor’s blessing on.

Thanks for being curious about the show, thanks for reading all this. See you soon in the feed.

PJ