A Podcast By Any Other Name

Everyone, everyone is alternatively squinting and hard staring into where we are headed in 2024 (eager to let 2023 go). While much futurecasting  is dire sprinkled with a few seeds of possible, maybe, hope for the future, podcast soothsayers are all rainbows and fairy dust. Despite a lag last year, podcasts are speeding toward the best of all futures, full La La Land ahead, for every full-blown or nascent podcaster — with video podcasting in the fray.

 

Already last year in February (2023), with New Year predictions still ringing in their ears, creators and executives at the Hot Pod Summit were speculating. Six months into audiobooks in the UK and Australia, Spotify was groping around for a way to convince themselves of audiobooks’ North American prodigiousness by betrothing them to podcasts and envisioning a seamless embrace. Nir Zicherman, co-founder of podcast hosting service Anchor and lead in Spotify’s audiobooks initiative, proudly proclaimed “Everybody’s scared to call a podcast an audiobook and an audiobook a podcast. But if you really squint, it’s harder to differentiate — and that is only accelerating over the course of the next few years.¹”

 

Perhaps holding back, perhaps riding shotgun, the audiobooks-podcast marriage has yet to consummate with it’s mid-November launch into US markets offering up fifteen free listens of audiobooks to Premier subscribers and its ambitious 2023 year-long podcast foray…well, with a $565m loss this year…the bride-to-be is looking a bit trampled on. Time will tell.

 

Is YouTube Killing the Podcast Star?

Also at Hot Pods in early 2023, was the format buzz – the beast in everyone’s bonnet being whether podcasts and YouTube video were destined to meet and merge. Some noted that “the fervor feels reminiscent of the so-called pivot to video that digital publishers fell victim to in the early 2010s to meet the demands of Facebook”.² Even podcasts YouTube video leader, Kai Chuk, hedged saying, ““podcasting is generally an audio-first medium” and that they would simply be implementing some audio labelling strategies, trying not to get stung if this video podcast thing got out of hand. So here we are now at the end of 2023 with everyone trying to get out ahead of this thing that is barreling toward podcasters, who are either determined to catch a ride or stand in front of it tossing fairy dust so they, the podcasters, can fly out of its way.

Statnostication

Here are the undeniable statistics:

• • According to a 2022 study by Podcastle, YouTube was the second most popular platform for podcast consumption among US listeners, with a market share of approximately 32%. This ranking indicates podcasts YouTube video has a significant presence in the podcasting landscape and its growing appeal among listeners.

 

• • In the same study, Podcastle found that the average number of episodes consumed by listeners per month through podcasts YouTube’s video podcasting was 6.5, higher than the averages for both Spotify (5.8) and Apple Podcasts (4.8). This suggests that YouTube is an influential platform for podcast consumption and retention.³

 

• • Additionally, a 2023 survey by Pew Research Center highlighted that the most popular platform among US teens (aged 13 to 17) for podcasts YouTube video consumption. This indicates YouTube’s potential to capture the next generation of podcast listeners and its ability to adapt to changing listener preferences.⁴

 

• • Statista, a leading provider of market and consumer data, reported that the number of podcasts available on YouTube worldwide had grown from approximately 500,000 in 2020 to over 1 million by the end of 2022. This signifies YouTube’s expanding podcast library and its ability to attract more content creators.

 

• • In the same Statista report, the average number of monthly podcast listeners on YouTube was estimated to be approximately 154.5 million in 2022. This figure is projected to increase annually, highlighting YouTube’s growing listener base for podcast content.⁵

 

Lights! Camera! Action! [As she madly beats her wings stirring a thick cloud of dust without any lift off.]

 

Slouching Toward Videoland^**

While platforms like YouTube and TikTok have revolutionized the way people consume visual media, favoring shorter, more instantaneously engaging content, audio has not felt this pressure. Podcasts are favoring aural richness, longer episodes, more complex (such as academic or specialty) subject matter, and multiple avenues of engagement through websites, blogs, social media and video. Podcasts are incorporating interactive elements to create a more personalized listening experience and becoming more reflective of diverse voices and experiences. 

 

In such a robust atmosphere, can podcasting be beginning its slouch toward video predominant formats? Is it, in its audio form, no longer the new kid but now the mature great aunt to hybrid audio-visuals? Is separation between forms and genres necessary, even beneficial, or stodgy and old fashioned? Damned if I know!

 

In his podcast, Confused About Video? Listeners Aren’t!, Tom Webster is also taking a more seasoned view. He’s maintained that YouTube is the best content search engine around since he began talking about this subject five years ago. He says that “even watching people talk into a microphone dramatically improves focus and comprehension”⁷, which I don’t agree with. (I think the reason listening to audio is potent is exactly because it ignites a different comprehension process to watching video, one that does not compete with visual ways of understanding.) 

 

Still, when responding to Sounds Profitable’s latest study, The Podcast Landscape^***, Webster reassures us that “fully two-thirds of Americans 18+ expect a podcast to always or usually be an audio medium,” and that the “agita” producers are feeling comes down more to a “mindset shift.” He suggests: “Instead of thinking about YouTube as a place to promote a podcast, imagine instead that it is a place to promote a podcaster,” noting the success of top hosts (one specifically who shall not be named) in promoting their podcasts on YouTube. 

 

He’s right to a degree – top hosts are riding the beast — YeeHaw! As for the rest of us, discoverability is key. Webster urges to “produce something, even a short that promotes who you are and why people should care about a show you make”, and he’s right because that is what most podcasters can do easily and will do and they will gain traction doing it.

 

Look Out! The YouTube–Video-Podcast Hydra (the mythical many serpent-headed beast, not the freshwater mini-monster) is still bearing down, as far as I can see and hear it.

 

O To Delve And Dive

A few things are apparent: Podcasts as YouTube videos are driven by listeners seeking something new. Youtube is a place of discoverability for podcasts. As such, it’s here to stay and increase. Also, those listeners actually watching whole podcasts on YouTube (instead of discovering them on YouTube, then primarily listening to them) are dedicated young YouTubers and teens, the under 21-year-old crowd. If the they continue to do so until constituting a major demographic, it’s in a way-off future (like any of us are going to be around by then. Just say’n). 

 

While the rest of us are turning to YouTube to scope out and be scoped out as we’ve scoped out so many things there, it seems likely even the most endowed (informationally speaking) host or guest can’t hold a listener’s attention for 40 minutes by just sitting speaking in front of a mic, no matter how sexy the mic. We are a generation of multi-taskers!

 

The real question in front of podcast producers staring into the future is how podcasts can evolve utilizing different and/or multiple formats (older, current, hybrid, and emergent) while practicing innovation, creativity, and risk-taking to shape and shift what it means to be an audio format into the future. 

 

Listening has been at the heart of what it means to exist and how to express that existence for a long time. We are shaped by our listening habits and it is a sign of societal well-being that podcasts are increasing in quality, sophistication, and number. Listen! It’s our future calling.

 

Back at that February 2023 Hot Pods summit, a truth is spoken that never gets old: “Ideas are what we should be investing in and thinking about,” Kaleidoscope’s Kate Osborn soothsaid. “Because if the conversation is only about, ‘Where can I put all of my energy into the thing that’s already working,’ then we’re 15 steps behind what is going to be the future. … This industry has changed every year for the last 10 years, so if we’re only going to cater to the now, then where are we?”

 

I’m pretty sure she had fairy dust in her hair.*

 

2024 Andrea Dancer