YouTube isn’t a podcast app, however that hasn’t stopped it from turning into the primary place individuals who need to eat on-line radio reveals now flip to. Based on the corporate, a staggering 1 billion individuals are tuning into podcasts each month on YouTube. That’s not simply greater than both Apple or Spotify can declare — it totally lays them to waste.
In 2023, Spotify reported it had 100 million common podcast listeners, and touted that half a billion individuals had listened to a podcast on its platform since 2019 when it began its push into the world of on-line radio reveals. Apple tends to come back out behind Spotify in third-party measurements. If a full eighth of the world’s inhabitants makes use of YouTube for podcasts, it looks as if that’s most likely the place the motion is.
Reaching that massive chunk of viewers takes further work for podcasters, although. Listeners can’t flip simply off their telephone’s display to pay attention until they’re paying for YouTube Premium, and other people might not need to stare at a static picture for an hour straight. Which means doing video to essentially make it depend.
Making video for YouTube is way costlier than it was. In a publication earlier this month, cooking creator Carla Lalli Music, previously of Bon Apetit, stated it value her $3,500 to shoot a single video for the platform. These have been extra difficult than a podcast video, but it surely nonetheless speaks to the platform’s demand for high quality as a way to get off the bottom. YouTube says that greater than 400 million hours of podcasts have been watched on TVs alone final yr. Video clearly issues; creators can’t simply activate their webcams and get outcomes.
Reaching YouTube’s viewers additionally means taking part in by YouTube’s guidelines. The platform doesn’t work with RSS feeds in the identical approach that the majority different podcast platforms do — each podcast has to turn out to be a local YouTube video. That requires them to play by YouTube’s advert guidelines, too, and use YouTube’s advert techniques. Podcasters can’t serve adverts the identical approach they do in every single place else, they usually can’t get the identical metrics they’d usually use to promote advertisers on their attain and success.
Nonetheless, that tradeoff has clearly been value it to an excellent many creators, and YouTube’s stats right now present why. It is probably not a standard podcast platform, but it surely’s an enormous one which podcasters can’t ignore.
