Happy Labor Day weekend, hope you’re all out enjoying the tail-end of summer rather than spending your time worrying about the market or reading too many uninformed opinions on the web. You can do that all winter 🙂
This week we did a brand new episode of What Are Your Thoughts, you can watch it below:
I wanted to take a moment to share a little bit about what we’re doing at The Compound, our fledgling media company focused on helping America’s investors make good decisions with their money. Yes, the tagline needs work, but that’s the mission.
Anyway, The Compound has grown up a lot this year. There are now three distinct podcasts on the network (Animal Spirits, The Compound and Friends and Ask the Compound) putting out five new episodes per week. Four of these shows appear on YouTube, either live during the recording or shortly after as edited, highly polished programs rivaling anything you can watch on traditional television. According to our analytics, the podcasts have broken a record in August: 877,874 downloads of our shows last month. That puts us on an annual run-rate for approximately 10.5 million downloads. The YouTube channel now has more than 125,000 subscribers and average minutes viewed is as high as its ever been – which means people are watching longer once they discover the channel.
This thing we’ve built – originally as an extension of our blogs – has now gone stratospheric. We have you to thank. Time is money. You’ve chosen to spend your time with us. I know how much that means so when we do stuff we make sure it’s nutrition-packed and time well spent. If you find yourself becoming a smarter, more aware investor as a result of our shows, then we are living up to this commitment.
I want to share some stuff about where we are taking it all because if you’re a regular listener or viewer or even a casual fan who checks us out occasionally, I want to take you with us.
The Compound is getting its own homepage on the web. This is something we haven’t spent enough time on up until now. But it’s coming. We’ve got people subscribed to our shows on podcast apps and YouTube and then people subscribing to the blogs written by me, Michael and Ben, but there hasn’t yet been a unified experience for Compound fans to sign up for, and this is about to be introduced. If you’re in the ‘Pound, now you can really be in the ‘Pound. When the site and email blast goes live, I will let you know here immediately.
We’re taking the show on the road. Over the last few years, we’ve done several live shows, usually as part of larger conferences that we’re attending. We did The Compound and Friends live from Dynasty Financial Partners’ investing conference this past November and from the MarketWatch Best New Ideas in Money festival before that. Ben and Michael have been doing live versions of Animal Spirits at various industry events for at least the last five or six years. This past Christmas we did a show to raise money for No Kid Hungry at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City and it was an amazing event – our fans came in from around the country to say hi to us and watch the show.
Our media production crew has gotten very good at all of this live stuff and I think we’re ready to come visit a city near you. We’re going to be taping our show from Future Proof again this September and then stay tuned for something we’re going to do from Charlotte, North Carolina this November.
We’ve expanded TCAF to a second weekly episode. Now you can listen to The Compound and Friends every Tuesday night which will include that evening’s audio from What Are Your Thoughts on YouTube starring Michael and I. People have been asking for the audio version of that show for years and now we’re giving it to you. I’m hosting the Tuesday podcast episode personally from now on, so expect additional takes directly from me each week and maybe even some surprise guests along the way.
More regular TCAF guest appearances on the way. You guys have spoken loud and clear: You want us to bring back your favorite guests more frequently. We’ve heard you and we’re shaping the schedule that way. Whether its Jill Schlesinger or JC Parets, Nick Colas or Dan McMurtrie, Carleton English or Tom Lee, we’ll bring back the people you want to hear from throughout the course of the year and mix them in with new faces and names and voices you haven’t heard from before. Now that we’re a couple of years in and we’ve learned about what you like, we want to give you even more of it.
Ask the Compound is a sleeper hit. It’s the newest show we’ve created so you may not have heard it or watched it yet. But the people who have really like it and are getting a lot of useful information each week. Basically, our in-house personal finance and investment expert Ben Carlson (Animal Spirits, A Wealth Of Common Sense) selects a few audience questions from the mailbag every Thursday afternoon and goes live on YouTube with answers. Our creative media director, Duncan Hill, co-hosts the show and asks lots of great follow-up questions during the discussion. They bring on a guest each week to help them help the viewers and listeners – usually one of the talented financial planners or researchers or accountants working at Ritholtz Wealth. You can participate in the show by emailing [email protected] and if we get to your question on the air, you’re getting a free gift from us in the mail. You can also comment live on YouTube as the video recording happens.
The official Compound store at idontshop.com is open for business. We’re coming back this fall with all new merchandise so you can tell the world what’s up.
The Compound Community is coming soon as well. For the past few years, the fans of Animal Spirits have had access to the show’s official Discord server and the community they’ve built, on their own, is really cool to see. People who are fans of the show, it turns out, also enjoy discussing the episodes with each other as well as their own ideas about investing, the economy, etc. We’re going to take that concept and run with it for the whole ‘Pound, giving you a place to go and talk with likeminded people who are interested in success, business, capital allocation, financial news and all of the other stuff we talk about across our channels. We’ll provide exclusive content, AMAs with the castmembers, charts and research we use on the shows, sneak peaks at upcoming guests and discounts to the merchandise store. It’s going to be really cool and super exclusive.
Anyway, suffice it to say there is a lot going on behind the scenes. I’m having a lot of fun making all this stuff for you and I love the feedback you’re providing as we grow and evolve. Lots more on the way, so stay tuned and keep checking for us.
We’ll see you next week.
