Academic OB/GYN

A few months ago we hit the seven year anniversary of Academic OB/GYN.  And today, I found out that we have been nominated in the AAGL Oscars for “Most Innovated Social Media Platform”.  This nomination was a pleasant surprise – I completely agree that we should compete for that title, but in truth it always a bit of a shock to find out that people in my field actually have seen what I have been doing here and appreciate it.  Most people are afraid  of social media, and seven years ago when I started this most people in medicine thought far more of the risks than any kind of benefits.   Since that time, things have changed, and many doctors have created robust social media presence.  Since I started, the big players have come on the bandwagon.  Now we have podcasts from all the major journals, and several website podcasts as well such as medscape and so forth.  But I am proud to have been one of the first ,and almost certainly the first to have significant presence in the field of OB/GYN.   With that, I thought it would be fun to recall how it started, and how the journey has been for me, and for the brand of Academic OB/GYN.

I started Academic OB/GYN the summer of 2007 at the University of Hawai’i.  The impetus to do so actually came from my fandom of a podcast called Diggnation, hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.  This was a podcast done by two nerds talking about nerd topics for an hour or so, and also doing a fair bit of drinking.  It came to me – wouldn’t it be great to do Diggnation for OB/GYNs?   So the next week I lined up some guests, fired up Garage Band, and published the first episode of the podcast.  It absolutely took off, and in its heyday we were getting over 500 downloads in the first 48 hours of a new podcast being published, and in some cases topping 5,000 downloads in the first month.   In the early years the audio quality was atrocious.  Some of the episodes were almost not worth listening to it was so bad.  But people liked the content, and they seemed to listen anyway.  The audio got better, though never really to a professional level.  But the content kept coming, and listeners kept growing.  I got lots of mail of appreciation and comments. In 2010 at the University of South Carolina I added Dr Paul Browne as a co-host, and it made the podcast even better.   Listenership grew even further.  This year we total over 102,000 downloads, over 50% of which listened to the entire podcast.  Our most popular episode was an early one with Dr Roger Newman, with over 8,000 downloads, still rising today.   Amazingly, new fans still download our old content, and while we haven’t published an episode in three years we still get 20-30 new downloads a day.  While total numbers are very little compared to downloads of wider appeal products, for a product that really only appeals to a very narrow slice of the world, the popularity has been staggering.

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