I’d rather be surfing

I am a fan of Ira Glass’ “This American Life“. The show is a great combination of honesty and insight with a healthy dose of hilarity. It’s great. And its available from iTunes and directly from the ThisAmericanLife.org website.

I am writing about it because in episode #345 (12/16/07) before the show starts, Ira gets on and asks for donations because the show spends about $152,000 in bandwidth costs per year in order to distribute the podcast at no cost to the listener. I ran some numbers and I think they are overpaying by about $75,000!

Here’s how…

First the numbers…

I’ve got about 10 “This American Life” Podcasts on my computer. The largest file is 29.9MB so I rounded up to 30MB to use for the average file size. [30MB per podcast]

Second, Ira actually gives some stats on number of listeners per week: “over 300,000 people listen to [This American Life] each week”. So we’ll use 310,000 for total listeners per week. [310,000 downloads per week]

Let’s calculate
With a little help from the Google Calculator:
310,000(podcasts) * 52(weeks) * 30MB = 461.196899 terabytes per year [GoogleCalc]
or 472,265.625 gigabytes per year [GoogleCalc]
or 39,355.4688 gigabytes per month [GoogleCalc]
That’s right: about 40 thousand GB per month! I told you it was a good show…

Back to the $75K
As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Amazon’s Web Services (I co-founded and help run the Amazon Web Services Meet Up in Silicon Valley). One of the most used and talked about AWS is the Simple Storage Service (better known as S3).  (All you need to know is Amazon charges an small amount of $ to store files and retrieve files from S3.  More details about it here.)

Amazon even provides this nice calculator for estimating your monthly bill based on how much of the services you think you will use. So, let’s plug in the almost 40 thousand GB and see what we get…

The AWS calculator tells us the cost to serve almost 40 thousand GB of data is $6,501.86 per month:

The (78) Grand Total
Now, with one more (Google) calculation, we have the annual cost of using S3 for distributing “This American Life”.
6,501.86 * 12 = 78,022.32
It should only cost $78,022.32 not $152,000! “This American Life” is overpaying by about $75,000!

Ira, I hope you read this!  If you know Ira, please send him this post.  I will help you guys get “This American Life” into S3 and out of the red.

Does this count?
One final question: If “This American Life” reads this post and ends up saving $75,000 in bandwidth costs for 2008 does this count as my NPR donation? :)