For podcasts, a sharp turn to video

YouTube is the new kingmaker for podcasts, said Ashley Carman in Bloomberg. The 20-year-old video-streaming service, owned by Google, said last week that “more than 1 billion people a month are now viewing podcast content” on its platform. That means that more people watch podcasts now than are listening to them on Spotify or Apple. YouTube is fueling the transition by “offering as much as $300,000 to podcasters to entice them to create video versions of their shows.” The interview-oriented, talk show–style content that has come to dominate in podcasting lends itself easily to video, said Angela Yang in NBC News.com. And people are increasingly watching YouTube not on their phones, but on their televisions. In effect, “people sitting in front of a TV today might be more likely to flick on a podcast than a prime-time talk show.”

The pivot to video began during the pandemic, said Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. Hosts “started recording their Zoom conversations,” and listeners had such a craving for human interaction “that they actually watched them.” Creators quickly realized “they could make real money turning their audio podcasts into videos, since YouTube pays them a share of advertising revenue from their content.” And audiences seem to love it. Young people, especially, report “feeling more connected to their favorite hosts because they can see them.”

The YouTube format has opened the door to minimal-production shows in which podcasters flip on a camera and talk, said Davey Alba in Bloomberg. It’s a format that’s worked magic for right-wing hosts such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Logan Paul, who don’t “style themselves as political pundits,” yet have frequently opined on politics and “described men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power.” All of this is “sandwiched between free-wheeling discussions of sports, masculinity, internet culture, gambling, and pranks,” which has made their shows catnip “to a voting bloc that helped propel Donald Trump back to the White House.”

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The risk is that YouTube reduces podcasts to a stream of sound bites, said Dan Granger in Variety. The podcast medium gave hosts “the ability to have long-form, complex conversations,” and listeners, to this point, have proven willing to be deeply engrossed for 60-plus minute episodes. This new YouTube format, however, means “catering to younger, clip-loving audiences across social media, relying on sound bites to garner attention.” All sorts of biases also get introduced when video enters the equation, said Nicholas Quah in New York magazine. A former print journalist who now makes audio-only narrative projects said of female podcasters: “If we wanted to be in TV, we would’ve gone into broadcast journalism.”