// consulting: case study
A year of running the media for the Ram Dass archive
Be Here Now Network · Media network, YouTube and podcasts · Client since July 2025
In short
Ram Dass was an American spiritual teacher who spent fifty years giving talks, and most of them were recorded. Be Here Now Network is the YouTube channel and podcast network built on that archive. It belongs to the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the nonprofit that holds his legacy, and the money it makes funds the foundation's work. In July 2025 the foundation asked Linslow to help run the YouTube side the way a media company would run it. This is what happened in the first eleven months.
- Monthly ad revenue doubled (up 116%), from videos the foundation already owned.
- Views more than doubled (up 143%), and the team went from publishing four original pieces a month to eleven.
- Hours watched grew 60%, on a back catalog that was already large and that most people would expect to fade.
- The people who run the channel now read one monthly briefing instead of pulling numbers out of YouTube's analytics screens.
monthly revenue
views
pieces published
hours watched
Average month before Linslow against average month since, July 2025 to June 2026. The starting point was modest. The direction is the point.
The foundation had been careful not to run its media too much like a business, out of respect for the teaching. We found the opposite was true: the more the channel was run like media, the more people the teaching reached, and the more the channel paid the foundation back.
The players
The network has three things most media companies would pay a great deal for: a deep archive of recorded talks, teachers who are still giving new ones, and an audience that keeps showing up. What it did not have was anyone whose only job was to turn those into results. The team posted episodes every week and kept up with the work. The numbers sat in YouTube Studio in a form nobody on staff had time to read.
Underneath that was a worry we heard early and often: that treating the archive like content, and the channel like a business, would cheapen the teaching. It is a fair worry. Our answer, after a year, is that the two were never in tension. The channel is how the teaching travels. Run it well and more people hear Ram Dass, and the foundation has more money to do its work with.
Run the channel well and more people hear the teaching. The money follows the reach, not the other way around.
How the work came online
Solid where it is live and running; dashed while it was being built; the hatched band is work under way that stays off the page. Tap a mark for what happened, how much work it was, and what it changed.
What changed
In July 2025 the channel was being kept up, not run. Episodes went out on schedule. Nobody had a monthly view of what they did once they were out. The staff were heads-down on each week's posting, and the media work was eating time the foundation needed for everything else.
The four numbers above are the result. Three things sit underneath them.
1. The growth came from what the foundation already had. Revenue doubled and views more than doubled without a new show, a new teacher, or a marketing budget. We did not grow the channel from nothing. We ran a catalog the foundation already owned well enough that it started paying the foundation back. The starting point was small, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
2. Hours watched went up on a catalog that should have been fading. Up 60%. Old recordings are supposed to lose their audience a little each year. This archive gained one.
3. What we actually brought was attention. The foundation had the archive, the audience and the teachers. It did not have one person reading the numbers every month and saying, in plain words, what was working and what to do next. That is the whole job. The numbers above are what that attention produced over a year.
How we went about it
First, make the channel readable. The first thing we built was not a strategy. It was a monthly report: the same handful of numbers, in the same order, every month, with a short written reading of what they meant. It was deliberately boring. A board can approve a media budget without anyone in the room being able to say what the channel did last month, and that was the first problem to fix. You cannot run what you cannot see.
Then, test rather than plan. Instead of a strategy deck we ran five separate experiments, each one a plain question with a yes or no answer: does posting more often help, do mid-roll ads pay, which kinds of video do best, what happens at much higher volume, and can a focused push grow paid subscriptions. Reporting the ones that stalled is what earned trust. You can back a team that tells you about its plateaus.
The clearest finding came from tagging every video. Two subjects reliably do better than the rest and get shared more: talks about consciousness and psychedelics, and talks about relationships. On form, a grainy archival lecture cut from the audio catalog reliably works, and polished promotional videos reliably do not. A lighter format, a lecture over a single still image, looks promising on a very small sample, so we are calling it a signal rather than a finding until there is more of it. The lesson underneath: the archive's deepest value is the audio, and the data shows how to turn that audio into hours watched at low cost.
The five experiments
Working
1 · Post more often
The question was whether a steady, higher publishing rate would grow hours watched without earning less per view. It did. We held a weekly rhythm and the hours climbed and stayed up. This is the experiment that did the most and photographs the worst: consistency, week after week. Honest note: the rhythm slipped in mid-April 2026 when the team meant to step it up and did not, and getting it back was the live operating job that summer.
Worked, then plateaued
2 · Mid-roll ads
Putting ads in the middle of the long videos that qualify for them lifted revenue, then flattened out in the first quarter of 2026. We said so before the numbers forced it. The plateau is not a failure. It is an answer: this lever is close to fully pulled, and the next gain has to come from somewhere else.
Working, with a clear answer
3 · Tag every video
We built a simple tagging scheme (subject, form, speaker, length) and re-ran the analysis as the sample grew. Consciousness and relationships outperform. Archival video from the audio catalog works, on fifty-seven pieces. Promotional content underperforms. The lecture-over-a-still format is strong on two pieces, which is not enough to bank on. The value is practical: it tells the team what to stop making.
Not yet run
4 · Much higher volume
What do dozens of videos a week look like, and what do they cost? Held on purpose until the format findings settle what a piece should cost to make.
Not yet run
5 · A subscription push
A quarter devoted to growing paid subscriptions was planned and never got its quarter; other work took the time. Recorded as it happened, and queued for the back half of 2026.
One recommendation, taken up
4 → 11 pieces a month
In an April 2026 working session we landed on a single priority: more long-form video, about eight minutes each, built from the audio archive, a strong talk over a simple visual. The network's own team ran with it, and monthly output went from four original pieces to eleven. This is the change that moved the money, and the team made it. The reporting's job was to make obvious which change was worth making.
Two working, one plateaued, two waiting. That is the real scorecard, and its plainness is what got us the next conversation.
What comes next
- Confirm the content findings at scale. The winning subjects and the archival format are solid; the lecture-over-a-still format needs about eight more pieces before it counts. If it holds, each hour watched gets cheaper to make
- Get the rhythm back. Steady posting is the engine, and the mid-April slip is the near-term fix
- Run the subscription push for real. Pick a quarter, commit to it, measure it
- The podcast side. What we learned on YouTube applies to the network's podcasts too, where the advertising has been sold below what the audience is worth. What those conversations taught now feeds a larger question about how the network should be set up, which is the foundation's to answer and stays off this page
We started this believing something simple: that Ram Dass's teaching reaches more people when the channel that carries it is allowed to be run like a channel. A year in, revenue, hours watched and output are all up, and the team that owns the channel made the changes that moved them. We are glad to keep bringing the same attention to the rest of the Love Serve Remember Foundation's work.