It was my pleasure once again to be a guest on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech. (Hopefully it wasn’t just because I wrote nice things about him. :-)) Towards the end of the show there were more than 3,000 people watching the live video stream on Stickam. I predict this will support “Doug’s 100-to-1” law in which I claim that the number of people attending or listening to a live event will grow by two orders of magnitude as an on-demand program. That means >300,000 listeners to the TWiT podcast, which I believe is in the ballpark for Leo’s show. (This link will be live when Leo post’s the show.)

This law stems from our very first podcasts of O’Reilly Media conferences back in 2004. With 400 attendees at the physical we almost always reached 40,000 unique individuals with the podcast editions. 1,000 physical attendees? …100,000 unique downloaders. I’ve long used this law as the basis for why events should be recorded, produced and distributors. Event producers are otherwise only reaching 1% of their potential audience. And the other 99% comes along almost for free.