Are you kidding me?

Imagine my horror when I received this little message in my inbox. Here is what they said:

“We launched Slidecast in 2007 to allow users to pair audio with their slides. While we have seen some great Slidecasts created, usage hasn’t been as widespread as we had hoped, and we have decided to discontinue this feature on SlideShare.

Slidecast will be retired in two phases:

• The ability to create Slidecasts will cease on Feb. 28, 2014
• Existing Slidecasts will be converted to static presentations on SlideShare on April 30, 2014

To save Slidecast files in their original form, creators can download their Slidecasts from their ‘My Uploads’ section by April 30, 2014. After April 30, we’ll convert existing Slidecasts (on the SlideShare site and embeds on other sites) into static presentations, so that there is not complete loss of content. For more information, please read FAQs.

We are sad that Slidecast is going away, but we want to focus on improving and adding SlideShare features that will resonate with more users. Thank you for your support.

The SlideShare team”

They are sad, I’m devastated. The hours of work that have gone into the 959 different slidecasts that have been created, now wasted!!!

As I write this, I can see that in January (and remember the bulk of this was school holidays) there were 3806 views (the peak was on January 15 with 369 views (was it raining that day?)

But this is a worldwide travesty, of those views the top 5 nations were;

Australia 2106

USA 478

India 327

Indonesia 127

Brazil 87

 

Since the first slidecast (3rd May 2009 – Integration by Partial Fractions – 772 views & 23 downloads) there has been 472 175 views (so close to half a million!!), and 10 009 downloads. That is an average of 272 view per day!!! OR 11 views per hour. This means that over the last 4 years 9 months, one of the slidecasts has been viewed every 5.3 minutes.

All time Top 5 nations;

Australia 178 533 (38%)

USA 40 001 (8%)

India 4 630 (1%)

China 4 286 (1%)

Philippines 2038 (0.5%)

The most popular presentation was the 2011 presentation on mathematical induction: series type 4139 views, which is pretty close to 5 times a day!!

So goodbye slideshare, it was fun while it lasted.