Anime fans George and Tony discuss current anime, past anime, news about anime, and anime related topics

We have been getting together and watching anime, and discussing it for several years, and decided that maybe other anime fans would enjoy hearing our thoughts and opinions, which led us to the creation of the Um, Like... Anime? Podcast.

One of the central ideas was "we watch so you don't have to". Every season, a great number of new anime debut, and we watch most of them. Some are good, some are bad, and we do the legwork to be able to recommend what to watch and what to skip. After the first few weeks of a new anime season, you've probably already decided what to watch, so we transition into a more in depth analysis of the plot and characters.
 

We started the podcast in January of 2021, but we had some scheduling difficulties, and ended up shelving the idea. A few months later, we solved our scheduling difficulties, and the podcast got properly underway with the spring season of anime (late March of 2021).
George has been a podcast listener for quite some time, and was, in particular, a fan of Anime News Network's ANNCast with host Zac Bertschy. George's sense of loss when Bertschy died created a drive to create a similar podcast. Since George and Tony regularly discussed anime, and George knew Tony watched a lot of new anime each season, he seemed the perfect co-host. Prior to starting the podcast, Tony had not listened to any podcasts, but was a fan of the Nearly On Red YouTube channel, which was essentially a vodcast that did deep-dive analyses of currently airing anime.
 

Our episodes are recorded once per week on Tuesday nights, which is the only time that both of us could find a large enough block of time for the marathon 5-hour recording session. We release the episodes spread throughout the week, and generally put out three 1-hour episodes per week.

In addition to the 5-hour recording session, each of us spends about 5 hours per week researching, editing, promoting, or engaged in other production-related tasks. This doesn't account for the 3-5 hours spent watching anime each week (which, to be honest, we would probably be doing anyway).

The startup costs for the podcast were minimal, since we are both musicians who own microphones and recording equipment. The hosting was also not an issue because Tony is a web developer, and he already has a webhost for his various projects.
 

What do we gain? Besides just the sheer fun we have while recording? I suppose a sense of community with our listeners is the main thing we would see as a gain. We always enjoy hearing from listeners, and wish we heard from more of them (and more often).

As far as financial gains, the podcast's only source of income is from our patrons on Patreon, which is currently about $10/mo. We are open to the idea of limited sponsorships, but since we are still very new to the podcasting world, we don't yet have a large enough audience to warrant any. Currently (about 4 months after launch) we are getting about 6-10 listens per day (between all the podcasting platforms, and YouTube). Because we are a podcast on a fairly niche topic, we have expected to grow slowly.
 

Our preparation for each week is probably as you would expect: watch a bunch of anime, take notes, make a schedule of shows we need to talk about, figure out the order in which to talk about them, and then hit the record button.

After recording, George edits each episode, and uploads the audio to the web server, as well as rendering a video of the audio waveform for YouTube. Tony creates the thumbnails and writes the episode descriptions for both the podcast/website and YouTube.

We're currently self-hosting the audio on our webserver which is using the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin on Wordpress, which has quite literally made the whole process 'seriously simple'.
 

Our show is on all of the podcasting platforms. We get a pretty equal split between all of the big ones (apple, google, spotify). One of best aqusition tolls seems to be YouTube, where we get as many views on each episode as all of the podcasting platforms combined.

We maintain a social media presence on the major outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), but we get more audience interaction on YouTube than anywhere else.
 

As we are fairly new to the podcasting game, we don't feel we are qualified to offer any real advice. We're still learning ourselves. Check back with us next year, and we'll see what sort of wisdom we may have accumulated.
 

We are basically everywhere (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) with the username UmLikeAnime.

If you'd like to offer financial support, you can find us on Patreon (patreon.com/umlikeanime).

Perhaps most importantly, you can find our podcast on YouTube, all the podcasting platforms (Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, etc. ), and on our website (UmLikeAnime.com).