Hello Sicko fans.
2022 is nearly over, and wow! What a world! You know, it’s so fun to know that our blue planet is peopled with countless kind, caring, thoughtful, creative, and gentle folks, and that also zero percent of them have any control over anything and instead the blood machine makes all of the rules.
Well! What can you do.
When viewed purely through the lens of Anime Sickos Podcast metrics, 2022 was a great year. I like to look at life purely through this lens whenever possible—I sure log on to Libsyn and look at the stats often enough. In fact, if you were to judge solely based on Anime Sickos Podcast metrics, 2022 is undoubtedly the greatest year of all time. Last year I used this gag and followed it up with a very stupid and lame “lol do NOT actually do this!” tag. This year I will not. You should do this! I’m doing it right now!
Anyway. On to the reason you’re here: the data! Well, I don’t know why you’re here. It’s the reason I’m here anyway.
NOTE: Once again we are using “IAB Downloads.” I do not know what that means. Libsyn offers two types of stats, “Unique Downloads” and “IAB Downloads.” The difference is that IAB Downloads always have a lower numbie. I decided in 2020 to use IAB Downloads in order to humble myself and I am continuing this year so that I can compare 2022 to previous years.
ALSO NOTE: I’m writing this on December 13th so when I refer to “2022” I am starting from December 13th 2021. Why didn’t I write this later in the month? Fuck you! Now’s when I have the time to do it.
TOTAL 2022 NUMBIES
Check it out:
We got nearly 82,000 downloads this year. That’s pretty good imo!
Last year we had 50,351. In 2020 we had 15,362. That’s a 62.8% increase from last year, and a staggering 433% increase since 2020. Wow!
I will admit that 2022’s yearly growth is not quite as dramatic as 2021’s was. 2021 more than doubled the total downloads of the preceding year, and while 2022’s 62.8% increase kicks ass it’s not quite the explosive growth we saw before.
For example, in last year’s review, I noted that 74.3% of all downloads occurred in 2021. Well, here’s our all-time total as of now:
Which means that 55.8% of all downloads came from 2022. Still a lot! Still a good numbie! But...I turn my mind back to the past, where there was a bigger numbie. Ah, bittersweet memory.
Though, it should be said that we released fewer episodes this year. 2021 saw 43 new episodes released, but at the time of writing, 2022 only had 36 episodes released. What does this mean?
Well, consider that, with 138 episodes released the average DLs per episode is 1063. HOWEVER! The average downloads of episodes released in 2022 is 1182. If we had released seven more episodes to match last year’s total, we can surmise we would have had 90,260 downloads, which would then render 2022 as 58.2% of all-time Anime Sickos downloads!! Hahaha!!! Ahhhh that actually isn’t that much.
Well, consider this: as of last year’s review, the average downloads per episode was a mere 667, and we only had two episodes that had broken a thousand downloads. Now the literal “average episode” has more than a thousand. Sure the 2022 episodes weren’t exponentially more popular than last year’s, but shit still kicks ass.
MONTH-TO-MONTH NUMBIES
I didn’t include December in the big pretty line because December is not yet over and thus the data is not representative of its true performance. Also it makes the line less pretty. Without further ado, the pretty line:
Oooh now DAT’s da GOOD line!!! Look at how the bottom number on the Y axis is 5,000. Yowza! Last year the bottom number on the Y Axis was 1,000!
As you can see, we have enjoyed a lovely upward climb with spikes in January and June—we’ll get to why when we discuss the top episodes of 2022.
I really love looking at my fun line. But what really makes it fun is when you extend it to cover the show’s entire lifespan. You may recall last year I said 2020 and before was “SHIT ZONE” and 2021 was “SICKO ZONE.” Well, I don’t want to do revisionist history and say 2021 was not the Sicko Zone. It was. Therefore 2022 must instead be called...
Look how good the big dick king zone is. God damn.
2022 RELEASES
In 2022 we released 36 episodes. By the actual end of the year we will have released at least 38—I’m going to include those two phantom episodes for the purposes of calculating some numbies. The first of which is that in 2022 we took a “Sicko Break” 27% of the time.
Whoa! That seems like a lot. That’s over a quarter of the time. Hm. Well, I don’t regret it. If we had bit the bullet and recorded during those weeks you’d have gotten a bunch of dud episodes where we didn’t have any juice.
Five episodes (13%) featured a guesto-mode goer. This is by far the fewest guestos we’ve ever had in a year. We used to say “one guest a month” and buddy! Five is not twelve! Why did this happen? Well, because it is harder to coordinate a recording with three people than it is with two people. This should not be read as an intentional movement away from guestos, merely that other shit was eating up a lot of our energy this year (more on that later).
That said, our five guestos this year were all total ringers. Just absolute all-stars. The delightful Gwynn Fulcher, the talented Zac Gorman, the loud Taylor Moore, the charming Terence Wiggins, and the wise MinovskyArticle. One of the best parts of 2022 was having the privilege to talk with and get to know these wonderful folks. Well we didn’t “get to know” Gwynn. We’ve known Gwynn forever. But it’s always a privilege to talk to her.
Three episodes (7.8%) were about anime. These were 132: The Dai Dark Episode, 120: The Sickos Talk Manga Again, and 108: The 86 and Ranking of Kings Episode. I wanna say how fucking funny it is that in the Ranking of Kings bit we go “the season’s not done but we can safely say this is one of the best shows in years even if it doesn’t stick the landing” and then not only did it not stick the landing, it said that it was good for Japan to oppress the savage Korean “people” and then had a child marrying an adult murderer to the delight of all gathered.
Of those, two are actually about manga. If you were an asshole you could make an argument that anime and manga should not be lumped together. First of all, shut up! Second, in that case, we would have done a single anime episode in the entire year (2.6%)
If you really, really wanted, you could technically consider 134: MinovskyArticle Goes Guesto Mode, 130: Mad God is Anime, and 123: RRR is Anime as being “about anime,” bringing the percentage to 15.7%. But why would you? As ever, our title is a fucking lie.
Three episodes (7.8%) featured the Fruit Annihilation Tournament, a segment which is both our longest-running and least-enjoyed. Rest assured though, it has concluded with Mango claiming victory, and we will not be doing that shit again. The time we would have spent with the Fruit Annihilation Tournament will now be used by our new segment Queen Watch.
Four episodes (10.5%) were just about some shit that happened to us personally. These include 115: The Sickos Become Institutionalized, about Joe’s stay in the brain hospital, 129: The Sickos Return from Vacation and 137: The Sickos Travel to Florida and Die, where we ask what the deal is with airline food, and 138: The Sickos Experience Entropy, where we get sad about how our bodies and computers both break so often. You know a podcast has a lot of fresh ideas with broad appeal when the hosts just talk about stuff that happened to them recently.
2022’s TOP EPISODES
These were the most downloaded episodes of 2022:
103: The Sickos Listen to Homework Podcasts for Business Freaks started 2022 off with a big-ass hit. I remember Twitter was lit up for us that day like never before. I guess it makes sense that an audience of podcast listeners are uniquely primed for podcast-based gags. We gotta get Jocko on for 2023.
We have, hilariously, both 104: The Sickos Read a Bunch of Posts and 125: The Sickos Read Even More Posts. You folks like posts.
115: The Sickos Become Institutionalized is one we’re really proud of, we are basically heroes for doing this one. 119: Corpse Brain and 111: The Devil is Real are both examples of our incredible genius insights into the truth of the world, coalescing a sinking feeling you’ve felt for years into sharp focus and giving it a funny name. 117: Fandom Blows Ass is both an extremely genius takedown of “fandom culture,” a dumb thing that degrades the art attached to it, and a cogent takedown of our dumb opinions by Whitney Reynolds, noted fandom enjoyer. 123: RRR is Anime is about RRR. Was it gonna be anything other than good? You could just read the RRR wikipedia page and it’d be a fun listen. 105: Complaining Kicks Ass is another point in our Sicko Mindset manifesto, an important thing to understand in order to live a genius life. And 121: Taylor Moore Goes Guesto Mode was one of our most rollicking guesto mode eps ever.
So you may remember from the pretty line that we had a big spike of DLs in January and June? Well in January we were simply “on one” for a few weeks. Episodes 103, 104, and 105 are all in the top four of the year. Episode 106, Shin Sicko City Nights: An Anime Sickos Adventure (the cyberpunk RPG one-shot run by Quinn Welsh-Wilson) wasn’t far behind either. Rest assured, the next episode was 107: Oops! All Sketches! which put that hot streak to bed.
June wasn’t as goated as January but had Taylor going guesto and the RRR episode in the same month. I bet if we had released 122: The Eagleheart Episode in another month and slotted a post-reading episode into its spot instead, June could have been even better, but I’ll take what we got.
And just for fun, here are the top ten most downloaded episodes over the show’s entire lifetime:
Only four 2022 episodes in there! Guess it makes sense, previous years have a big head start. I am still very pleased to see 82: The Tragical History of Modesty City up there, but I fear as time passes it will only fall...oh well.
THE SICKOS WORLDWIDE
As ever, our horrible goop spreads across the globe:
Really the only change from the map last year is that finally we have downloads from China. It is, to be clear, one download, so it was almost certainly not done on purpose, and whatever mistake led to said download was not repeated. You could say that a data visualization that represents a single download by coloring in the entirety of the third largest nation on Earth is not doing the best job at representing what the data actually says. You could also say, “damn! Dat’s a lotta countries goin’ sicko mode!” which is what I do.
Here is the actual list of countries with the most Sicko downloads in 2022:
As you can see the vast majority of listeners are from the US and the other major English-speaking countries. Non-English speakers include various nations in Europe (which let’s be real is mostly also English-speaking), Argentina (we have a strong Argentinian delegation somehow. Not sure how that happened. Very appreciated), and a newcomer to the list, India. Last year, India represented a mere 34 downloads. I have to imagine this bump came from people Googling “RRR podcast” and finding RRR is Anime. But hey—that episode only has 194 Indian downloads. So at least some folks liked what they heard and stuck around!
DA SUMMARY AND DA FUTURE
None can deny that 2022 was a home-run year for Anime Sickos. We didn’t see the explosive growth of 2021, but no matter. 2021 was only explosive because 2020’s numbies were so low.
I have said before that Anime Sickos is the first project of mine where I do not experience dissonance between what I know it to be in my head and how it is actually received (not technically true, I also felt that about my live show the Skewer, but for our purposes here I am talking about non-live stuff). By this I mean that other times I put work into the world knowing in my heart, without doubt, that this shit is good and different and unique and special. The world would then respond with indifference. The message seemed to be, “this shit is NOT good, different, unique, or special.” I simply refused to believe it. No, there has to be something wrong. I know I’m right!
Well, I am right! Turns out yeah! A lot of my creative work has been sort of a mild mental torture in that I am compelled by a force I cannot resist to do it, but I reap very little reward. Folks we reap reward with this Anime Sickos shit. The reward is 1) big numbies and 2) the sicko fans.
I really do appreciate all of you out there who listen. Anyone who enjoys what we have to say is a wise genius and it feels so good to have acquired the acquaintance and friendship of such a wide variety of wise geniuses. It feels like the world’s really going out of its way to shove the dumbest, cruelest monsters in our faces all the time. This show, and all of you, do a lot to remind me that’s not the only way.
So, what’s in store for 2023? Well, in short, the next Anime Sickos Secret Project. You may recall I mentioned earlier in this essay that we have taken a disproportionate amount of Sicko Breaks and failed to book the usual number of guestos this year due to our energy being siphoned up elsewhere. Well, it’s because of the Secret Project.
All I can say is that it is an audio drama in the same fictional world as our previous ones. The scope and ambition of it dwarfs what came before. I cannot expand on that last sentence with specifics. Rest assured you will laugh when you discover the truly stupid burden we have lashed to our backs. I began writing the script in April of this year and as of this week I have sent the last of the edited vocal tracks to Adam Goron (audio engineer of The Tragical History of Modesty City) for post-production. I cannot estimate when he will finish with it but the main part is that, for the first time in eight months, I do not need to fill every single second of my free time with work on it. It is out of my hands. I can focus on other shit. Wow!
And what other shit will we focus on? Well, as much as we wish to be pure and moral and have a Patreon with no rewards, we will most likely retool the Patreon in the coming months. Every dollar it has collected in 2022 has gone to the Secret Project (which has not even covered half the expenses lmao) and uhhh we wanna make more money so we can quit our jobs. The likeliest outcome is we will be introducing higher tiers (for freaks who want to pay a lot for some reason) and starting to put out regular Patreon-exclusive mini-episodes. These are gonna be nowhere near the level of effort we put into the real episodes, it’s mostly gonna just be us chatting and yammering for 15-20 minutes. So don’t feel like we’re gonna become one of those shows who puts half the episodes behind the paywall (hate those).
But the main thing is we are excited to bring you more classic Anime Sickos episodes so that you can become even more of a wise genius. We really love doing this show and it’s such a privilege that you all like it...and such a joy that your esteem gets given to me in da form of big numbies!
Thank you for a 2022 of numbies! See you in 2023 homies!!
-Tom