for reference of how costly transcripts are, the first “speech-to-audio” conversion is about $1.25 per minute, and it could take 1x the time of the audio to fix the mistakes when both have native accents, and up to 2x the audio time for non-native speakers. For a 1h podcast, this would amount to $75 + hourly rate, so roughly $100/podcast. Additionally, there’s a YT-generated-subtitles free alternative. I’m currently trying this out, I’ll edit this to let you know how long it takes to fix them per audio hour.
IMO, that’s shockingly cheap, and there’s little reason to not do transcripts for any podcast which has a listening audience larger than “your gf and your dog” and pretensions to being more than tissue-level entertainment to be discarded after use. If a podcast is worth taking hours to do and expecting hundreds/thousands of listeners to sit through spending man-hours apiece and trying to advertise or spread it in any way, then it’s almost certainly also then worth $100 to transcribe it. A transcript buys you search-engine visibility (as well as easy search/quotation in general), foreign audiences (reading is a lot easier than listening), the ability to annotate with links/references, and a lot of native listeners who don’t want to sit through it in realtime (reading is also vastly faster than listening). Notice how much more often you see Econlog, 80k Hours, or Tyler Cowen’s Conversations linked than many other podcasts, which decline to provide transcripts, and whose episodes instantly disappear*.
* I’m looking at you, A16Z. Not transcribing your podcasts is ludicrous when you are one of the largest VC firms in the world and attempting to remake yourself into an all-services VC empire based in considerable part on contemt marketing.
for reference of how costly transcripts are, the first “speech-to-audio” conversion is about $1.25 per minute, and it could take 1x the time of the audio to fix the mistakes when both have native accents, and up to 2x the audio time for non-native speakers. For a 1h podcast, this would amount to $75 + hourly rate, so roughly $100/podcast. Additionally, there’s a YT-generated-subtitles free alternative. I’m currently trying this out, I’ll edit this to let you know how long it takes to fix them per audio hour.
IMO, that’s shockingly cheap, and there’s little reason to not do transcripts for any podcast which has a listening audience larger than “your gf and your dog” and pretensions to being more than tissue-level entertainment to be discarded after use. If a podcast is worth taking hours to do and expecting hundreds/thousands of listeners to sit through spending man-hours apiece and trying to advertise or spread it in any way, then it’s almost certainly also then worth $100 to transcribe it. A transcript buys you search-engine visibility (as well as easy search/quotation in general), foreign audiences (reading is a lot easier than listening), the ability to annotate with links/references, and a lot of native listeners who don’t want to sit through it in realtime (reading is also vastly faster than listening). Notice how much more often you see Econlog, 80k Hours, or Tyler Cowen’s Conversations linked than many other podcasts, which decline to provide transcripts, and whose episodes instantly disappear*.
* I’m looking at you, A16Z. Not transcribing your podcasts is ludicrous when you are one of the largest VC firms in the world and attempting to remake yourself into an all-services VC empire based in considerable part on contemt marketing.
Thanks for the cost estimates on producing transcripts, that’s helpful!
FWIW I find it taking more than 1x for native speakers, but I think never longer than 2.5x for anybody.