Podcast Movement, the annual conference that proudly proclaims itself as ”The World’s Largest Podcasting Community”, was held in the Washington, DC suburbs a few weeks ago, and I was there with bells on. It’s one of my favorite events. One of my favorite things about it is the way it is a meeting place for the entire spectrum of people involved in podcasting, from the tiniest independent creators to the most well-funded networks. This mishmash creates unique moments of convergence—it’s fun to stand at a hotel bar and turn to your left to meet someone who just bought a Blue Yeti and a Riverside subscription and is really excited to get his third episode out next week, then turn to your right and meet a VP of New Media Strategy from Warner Brothers. This has benefits for people all across the spectrum. Large networks and production companies can scout for talent. Independent creators can clearly see the ladder they aim to climb. Medium-sized operations like mine can take the temperature of the industry from all angles. Service providers can show off all the latest hardware and software. Everyone wins.
But this year’s Podcast Movement was noticeably smaller and less exuberant than it has been in the past. There was a 46% reduction in the number of exhibitors since the 2023 conference, with many of the most noticeable absences coming from the high end of the power scale. Hollywood had largely left the building: Disney—which the year before had thrown up a princess castle from which they handed out massive hardcover storybooks as conference swag—was nowhere to be seen. Paramount, while still named as the conference’s lead sponsor, had also absented itself from the floor. Streaming giants Spotify and Amazon had exhibited in 2023 but now were gone (or at least less visible), as were TV networks like CNN, ESPN, and NatGeo.
This wasn’t surprising, considering the past six or seven quarters that the large-budget end of the podcast ecosystem had suffered through. Eric Nuzum astutely observed in Vanity Fair last March that “The dumb money is gone, the easy money has slowed down, and the smart money has seen some pullback”, as all around us the podcast advertising market saw a “correction” that led titans like iHeart and Spotify to lay off hundreds of production staff. With the big players retreating and licking their wounds, the crowd at this year’s conference leaned much more heavily to the small and self-funded. And without those dizzying heights on display for them to aspire to, the mood among these creators was decidedly more befuddled and anxious. While the audience for podcasting is clearly still strong—hundreds of millions of people listen to podcasts regularly—the road from launch to audience to money for independent producers has never been less clear.
There was a solution everyone seemed to be circling around, though. The same magic pill was held up again and again as the answer to every problem a struggling podcaster might have: discoverability, monetization, brand building, and beyond. And what was this podcast panacea? Of all things, the 20-year-old grandaddy of digital media apps, YouTube.
Again and again, at panel after panel, this advice was presented as obvious, straightforward, and simple: “add video to your production process, make both long and short videos, and get those videos up on YouTube. Audience growth and advertising dollars will surely follow.” Watching these presentations I felt like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, wanting to stand up and shout something that the crowd was ignoring: making a shift from audio to video is neither straightforward nor simple, and the potential rewards of doing so are far from guaranteed.
As I’ve written about before, video is a totally different medium than audio, and brings a whole raft of new considerations:
- How do we make this look good? We need to consider not just microphones now, but also cameras, which are more complicated and expensive. But also…
- How do we make this look good? We now have to consider setting: where will we record this, and what does it look like? How is it lit? What will I wear? How do we control these things for guests who call in remotely? Do THEY have a camera? And also…
- How do we make this look good? Audio editing was one thing, but video editing is more complex in every dimension. Listening to the two of us talk for 30 minutes is fun, but do people want to watch us for that long? Won’t they get bored? So do we shorten? Add elements? Either way, we now need graphic elements… who can design those? Will they look good without hiring someone? And jeez, video files sure are big. Can my computer handle the load?
- How do we make this look good: A lot of the editing we used to do is no longer possible. Those stray noises and hesitations I used to cut out? Now those have to stay in or else we have choppy jump cuts everywhere. The way we used to cut up sentences and push paragraphs around to make the story clearer? Again, not really possible any more without a lot more creativity in post-production.
Of course, there are plenty of services and solutions on offer that promise to address these issues, but there’s only so much they can do. Creating a video series is fundamentally more complex than an audio one, no matter what software you use to edit it.
And complex is not the same as good. Podcasting started as an audio-only medium for two reasons: the limitations of the delivery system, yes (iPods didn’t originally show video), but also because audio storytelling is a medium with unique creative and logistical advantages. It’s intimate, it’s comforting, it’s accessible, it fits into places in people’s lives where video cannot, and you can produce and edit the holy heck out of it for a fraction of the logistical challenges of doing something similar in video. These are distinct advantages, and they are the original reasons that podcasting became so popular.
Because video is so much more demanding, once you “add” video, it is almost impossible to not be producing for video first, with audio as a secondary output. Once you do that, you’re not really making a podcast anymore, you’re making a YouTube series. There’s nothing wrong with that—there are plenty of wonderful and successful YouTube series—but it’s a different thing, and it will not be successful unless you acknowledge that and address the strengths and weaknesses of this other medium. And it should be absolutely obvious that doing so is not a guarantee of success.
On a fundamental level, the algorithm has no clothes. One of the great discussion points at events like Podcast Movement has always been “discoverability”—how will people who might like your show become aware that it exists? While Spotify has made improvements in this regard, none of the popular podcast apps have ever been particularly good at feeding you suggestions. This is the greatest promise of YouTube—access to its algorithm and the way it will grow your audience by serving your episodes to people who wouldn’t otherwise have known about them.
While there is some truth to this—YouTube’s algorithm is much more robust than anything on the audio apps—holding this up as the great answer to the discoverability question ignores a huge issue: while there are thousands of videos on YouTube that have attained millions of views each, these represent only a miniscule fraction of the content that exists on YouTube. There are a lot of videos on YouTube that do not find an audience at all. Really a lot. An awful lot. A staggeringly huge awful lot. So many that it’s hard to wrap your brain around how many there are.
There are more than 500 hours of new video content uploaded to YouTube every minute.* That’s more than 7 million hours every day, more than 50 million every week. These numbers are in hours of total run time, not numbers of videos. The average video on YouTube is 11 minutes long.** Most are much shorter. So if someone decided to sit down and watch every video uploaded to YouTube in a single month, they would have to consume millions and millions of individual pieces of content. Assuming they watched for every single moment they weren’t sleeping, it would take them more than 34,000 years.
Clearly not all of these videos are being avidly viewed by large numbers of people. Very much not. An easy statistic to find is that the average YouTube video has 5,594 views. This is technically correct, but dramatically misleading. This mean average is seismically skewed by the fact that the top 4% of videos account for 97% of traffic, with the top few hundred performers surpassing a billion views. The all-time most successful video in YouTube history (“The Baby Shark Dance”) has been viewed 14.9 billion times. It is almost impossible to conceive of how many low-view-count videos you need to balance out these high performers and get down to an average of less than 6,000. If the only videos on the site were “The Baby Shark Dance” and 500,000 others that had one view each, the average viewership per video would be nearly 30,000.
More useful statistics are***:
- The bottom 4%—hundreds of millions of videos—have no views at all, so unpopular that even whoever uploaded them couldn’t be bothered to do a test viewing.
- Half of all videos uploaded to YouTube—millions and millions every day—achieve fewer than 35 plays. 65% have fewer than 100.
- Half of all videos on YouTube never receive a single like or comment.
- 10% of all YouTube channels have no subscribers
Do these sound like terrible odds? They certainly are. They are significantly worse, in fact, than the mathematical odds of having a successful audio podcast. There are something in the neighborhood of 100 million total downloadable episodes on the Apple Podcast app**** with a median per-episode listenership of around 400.***** This is daunting, but undeniably more statistically attractive than the almost countless billions of videos on YouTube with their median viewership of 35.
Clearly, turning your podcast into YouTube videos is not a magic switch you can flip to find a large audience. In fact, for most podcasters, making the leap into video with a show that was unsuccessful on the audio apps is like leaping into the Pacific Ocean to save yourself from drowning in a bathtub.
So when does it make sense to make YouTube a significant part of your podcast strategy? When both of these are true:
- You are making a show that would work just as well or better as a video series
What works well in video? Something that is staged in such a way that it looks good on camera: well shot, well lit, well framed, showing good-looking people doing something interesting with something nice in the background. If you are building your podcast around remote interviews, it is very hard to not have it end up looking like a Zoom call (and very few people are going to YouTube because they want to see more Zoom calls). If what you are doing was not built from the beginning to be as visually attractive as it is interesting to listen to, the time, trouble, and expense of making that shift will all be very high, and you run the real danger of destroying what was good about your current way of working in order to make those changes. - You have the production knowhow and resources to make quality videos
Recording audio and video make different demands and editing them use very different techniques. For similarly-scaled projects, video is always more complicated, so it will always be more expensive.
I’m not saying that there is no role for video in podcasting, but if you want to start a “video podcast” (which is really a YouTube series that you also release to an audio feed), or incorporate video elements for promotional reasons, do these things thoughtfully, in ways that respect the differences between the two mediums and don’t mess up what you’ve already built. Most of all, don’t confuse these two very different kinds of storytelling and start thinking they are interchangeable, or that one is an easy fix for the logistical problems of the other.
*And those are 2019 numbers, the total is almost certainly higher: https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-uploaded-to-youtube-per-minute/
**https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/
*** https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/research-youtube-stats/
**** Podcast Industry Insights courtesy of Daniel J. Lewis. https://podcastindustryinsights.com/apple-podcasts-statistics/
*****https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/podcast-marketing-trends-2023/
(David Hoffman is the Founder & Principal of CitizenRacecar)
