Every single day, people watch almost five billion videos on YouTube. The average user spends 16 minutes 44 seconds on the platform per day.
Is that enough of a reason to start turning your podcast episodes into YouTube videos? Well, if that logic held up, you’d likely hear more people suggesting you move to India or China to get more listeners.
So perhaps it is time for solid, concrete reasons to start building a podcast audience on YouTube.
The number-one reason people advise podcasters to turn their episodes into YouTube videos is to be found by more people. And while this is true, every time you add your RSS feed to a podcast app, you also grow the number of people who can find you.
So there has to be more to it than that, right?
Discoverability is the podcaster’s nemesis. Being found takes work first and persistence second. This is why many of the biggest podcasts have entire teams dedicated to discoverability. In fact, there are at least 1,000 press releases every day that alert the world to new shows or episodes.
Discovery is what YouTube does best.
Marquees Brownlee, one of the most viewed YouTubers on the platform, recently commented on the YouTube discovery phenomenon himself. Having started the WVFRM Podcast on YouTube, Marquees is uniquely qualified to comment on its discovery features as it relates to podcasting. He stated, “YouTube has a discoverability advantage. You might be watching basketball highlights, and a podcast featuring one of the basketball players pops up.”
That “suggested” feature is what keeps the average YouTube visitor on the site for more than 16 minutes at a time. Not only is YouTube unique in that respect, but it has also trained its audience to bounce from one video to another through those related video thumbnails. Neither the presence of the related video thumbnails nor the culture of people placing importance on them exist on other platforms.
And YouTube is one of the social media platforms that defined social media in the first place. Unlike every media medium before social, YouTube created an unprecedented level of distribution, starting with the very smallest aspect—the YouTube video watcher. Since sharing is a natural function of social media that allows users to engage with their followers and friends, YouTube gives fans that opportunity… and the process is so ingrained in our culture, no explanation is needed.
How often do you find a podcast episode from Apple Podcasts shared on Facebook versus a YouTube video? Because of that, with your podcast in video format on YouTube, you can be found by users who share the videos to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and 1,000 other places.
In addition, through the YouTube’s Creative Common License, productivity software like Content Gorilla can grab YouTube videos and automatically turn them into full blog posts for content creators. This means a podcast video on Youtube could show up transcribed as a blog post that is then searchable in another place—and just like that, it’s ready to be discovered.
And let’s not forget all the bloggers and website owners who look for videos to add to their content using the simple “embed” feature built into YouTube.
Finally, the video itself, the video channel, the video embedded in a blog post, and the video turned into a blog post by Content Gorilla will all show up in Google search results.
So, if you truly want to be found, how can you turn down the opportunities that YouTube presents?
MONETIZATION
Revenue generation is another benefit with the very mature platform YouTube has built. YouTube offers partners many options for adding revenue to their content. Vehicles such as video ads, Superchat, Super Stickers, merchandise, and even private video subscriptions are available on YouTube.
And while some of the podcast platforms will dynamically insert ads into your podcast automatically, YouTube gives podcasters complete control over the ads and the types of ads, including manually placing the ads in the content. They have all the options, as well: pre, mid, and post-roll ads, with audio ads soon to come.
But as stated above, ads are just a piece of the puzzle.
ANALYTICS
Finally, one of the strongest reasons for being on YouTube is the analytics. Unlike all other podcast platforms, YouTube’s analytics are extremely granular and thorough, providing a level of knowledge unavailable almost everywhere else. And the deep-dive analytics are good not only for you as the podcast owner, but also for the advertisers themselves.
Imagine knowing how often people re-listen to your shows and which episodes. Imagine knowing how many are listening right now, and how many listen in the morning versus evening. Imagine finding out how many listeners found you via search and what they searched for. Imagine learning that many of your visitors are listening to your shows because they have been embedded in their other sites of interest.
Finally, imagine taking that information and improving your show, so it benefits your Apple Podcasts’ audience.
Sure, YouTube is a beast that has a learning curve and is going to make producing your podcast a bit more complicated. But will the results grow your show like never before?
August 2022 Issue
