Reruns? That's a great way to destroy a podcast in 6 months.

The Office Ladies move to twice a week (asterisk)

The TLDR in this Variety article is that Office Ladies is moving to twice a week*.

What caught my eye is this part:

In addition to “Office Ladies 6.0,” they’re rerunning the rewatch over from the beginning — along with new material — in a podcast that will begin on Nov. 11 called “Second Drink.” This title refers to the show’s Season 2 premiere episode “The Dundies,” when an extremely wasted Pam schools Jim (John Krasinski) on the art of making the most of frozen drinks. As a giggly Pam sucks on a straw, Jim says, “I think those might be empty.” Pam replies: “No, no, ’cause the ice melts, and then it’s like second drink.” These episodes will drop on Mondays, starting with the series premiere. As Kinsey described “Second Drink” during the podcast, “Every Monday we will be rerunning the rewatch library in order with bonus tidbits at the top of every episode.”

Here’s the thing:

Your biggest fans have heard those episodes. Yes, I see the part about “new material” - I’ve been doing this audio stuff for 32 years now and I’m telling you the talent might be into that NOW but check back in a few months when it becomes one more thing they have to do in the production session along with the spots and the actual main podcast.

And, despite the exciting new material, the episodes are already in the feed. If you want to listen to them, you can1

I actually like Office Ladies, and I just checked my podcast app and see that I’m up to - lol - Episode 43 “Ben Franklin” which published September 2, 2020. Should I find myself with the time to catch up on 200 weekly episodes, I will. (If you get in the mood for something AND listen at 2.3x you can actually chip away at something like that reasonably quickly-ish.) I’m not sure I need a second version of Episode 44 Phyllis’ Wedding, despite the “new content.”

Look, I get it. Someone said that we could make more money for minimal work by going to twice a week. That probably sounded really appealing to the hosts (and/or their agents) to work 5 extra minutes to get even more midrolls in. I imagine Sales is Very Excited.

But here’s what might happen on the consumer end….

The diehards will say “I heard this already” and you will clutter up their feed.

Step one will be the consumer deleting the annoying reruns. So hooray for the advertisers that will have inventory in the second episode which never gets heard. Sales hit their number. Stop asking questions.

Step two will be the diehards switching off auto-downloads. The mindset will be that instead of deleting the annoying reruns, they will just download the new episodes. Sales will ask why the numbers are down. Sales will move on to their new shiny object as sales tends to do.

Step three will be forgetting to download the new episodes. Next thing you know, 400 episodes have gone by.

Oh, but you’ve now committed to rerunning years and years of episodes. Oops.

Or, you could, you know, just listen to the podcast from beginning.

Anyway, Office Ladies is now twice a week. Sort of.

Speaking of reruns, here’s something else I wrote: