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We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and we’re dropping in today with your Burnt Toast Podcast Year In Review.

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Episode 174 Transcript

Virginia

It has been a really great year for the podcast, wouldn’t you agree, Corinne?

Corinne

I would agree.

Virginia

Yes. I don’t know that we celebrated this properly at the time, but a few months ago, we actually passed 1 million downloads this year, which is wild to me.

Corinne

Honestly, I can’t think about that too hard.

Virginia

Then I will not tell you that we are now at 1.32 million, as of this recording.

Corinne

My gosh! It’s wild.

Virginia

I know it’s really cool. I feel super proud of the podcast. I love making it with you.

Corinne

So we are going to take this opportunity to chat about listeners’ five favorite episodes of the year—plus the least popular episode!

Virginia

The poor, unloved episode.

Before we dive in, I feel like I need to own up that this is a very imperfect science I used to rank the episodes. Since we do a mix of paywalled and unpaywalled episodes, I can’t just go by total download numbers. That’s because the paywalled episodes—Corinne, this will be reassuring to you, as someone who’s primarily on paywalled episodes—have lower number of downloads on these. So the million downloads is not all you.

Corinne

Yeah. And it’s a million downloads across all episodes, right?

Virginia

Yes. This is episode 174 so I think that number, the 1.3 million, is like, current to 170 or something like that.

But I did look at which episodes were downloaded the most for the year, and then I also looked at which episodes the paywall was most effective—meaning that you all paid to listen. Because that tells us a lot about is this episode striking a nerve so much that you’re like, “yes, I will pay $7 or for Extra Butter folks, $99 to listen to this episode.” So I think that’s pretty indicative of its popularity.

Corinne

It’s always fun to see what people are excited about. And where we sometimes fail with writing headlines.

Virginia

We work so hard on the headlines, and sometimes I think we’ve really nailed it and then we have not at all.

I will also say I’m exempting from the data last week’s episode, as of this recording. The Tyranny of th