Ahem!TV: No more episodes?

Visit the official Ahem!TV website to watch this week's episode!

We want your comments. Please join in the discussion and please be civil!

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By now, all you loyal viewers have realized that we have not produced a new episode of Ahem!TV since early April of 2006. I recently looked back at the server statistics for Ahem!TV and saw that our viewership actually peaked in mid August with over 1700 downloads that month. That averages out to 54 viewers per day.

This is the first reason we stopped producing Ahem!TV. The daily viewership was not sufficient to justify the enormous amount of time that went into writing, shooting, editing, encoding, and updating the website for each new episode. Compound that by the fact that when I say "we" and "our", I'm really saying me. Whereas I did have much appreciated help running the camera on several of the shoots, everything else was done by me. So, I had to make a decision on how best to spend my time.

The second reason we stopped producing Ahem!TV is that we had only one viewer email. It was a very thoughtful, honest email offering their support and advice. I appreciate constructive feedback. In fact, it is feedback of any type that keeps a show going. Since Ahem!TV was a free show, the only indications I had of how I was doing was the number of downloads and viewers' comments. So, the single comment clearly indicated to me that the show just wasn't hitting the target.

The final reason we (I mean I) decided to discontinue the show is that the viewership paled in comparison to our other vodcast series, the Adventures of Thomas Brin. In all of 2006, Ahem!TV had about 10,000 downloads. Compare that to over 1 million downloads for Thomas Brin--and that is just in the last half of 2006!

So, whereas Ahem!TV was fun to produce, and it offered me my own personal bully pulpit (I am very opinionated, after all), it just did not have strong viewer metrics.

By the way, if you have sent an email in the past 6 months to Ahem!TV and have not heard back from me, I apologize. Our primary email provider (.Mac) has blocked all forwarded email from our dedicated server. We recently discovered that we have been missing all sorts of forwarded email for quite a while. So, if you want to say hi or ask a question, please leave a comment on this blog. Or, you can try emailing again. We have set up an internal mailbox that will allow us to read all emails before they are forwarded to .Mac.

Thanks for watching!