How YouTube Ate Podcasting

In 2024, podcasts are about as mainstream as media gets. Sure, their audiences are hugely fragmented and largely invisible to one another — the monoculture remains dead and rotting. But the medium is, on the whole, very popular, and individual hosts have become major celebrities with serious cultural and political influence. What started as a loose group of DIY online broadcasters has long since become a full-fledged industry with its own trends, booms, and busts.

A lot has changed for podcasting in two decades, but one shift is both underrecognized and obvious: It’s not really an audio medium anymore. Edison Research, the gold standard of podcast analysts, laid it out last month:

YouTube, typically known as the go-to platform for video content, has risen to the top as the most popular service used for podcast listening in the U.S. … 31% of weekly podcast listeners age 13 and up choose YouTube as the service they use most to listen to podcasts, surpassing Spotify (27%) and Apple Podcasts (15%).

The trend is more pronounced among younger listeners, Edison says, citing research from earlier this year, which found that “84 percent of Gen Z monthly podcast listeners … listen to or watch podcasts with a video component.” That more podcasts now have “video components” is obvious enough — when people think of Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, they don’t just hear him, they see him in his studio — but this report suggests a more fundamental change. Ben Cohen argues in The Wall Street Journal that for younger listeners, podcasts aren’t the new radio. They’re more akin to a new TV:

For a decade, podcasts were something you listened to while you were doing something else: driving, working out, unloading the dishwasher. That was a passive experience. Now an entire generation has been conditioned to think of podcasts as something they can actively watch any time on any kind of screen — a phone, a computer, a TV.

This might be overreading the data; most video podcasts are still primarily audio products, legible to listeners without the video feed from the studio (or sofa or webcam). While Edison’s research notes that video helps young listeners feel “more connected” to podcasters, we’re still left to wonder how, in a few short years, YouTube became not just a popular place for podcasts but podcasting’s new default. In 2016, Apple was the only podcast gatekeeper that mattered; even just a few years ago, the prospect of its podcast app dropping to third place behind a video platform would have been hard to believe. YouTube has been around nearly as long as podcasting, and Spotify — which this month announced a plan to offer podcasters YouTube-style monetization — has been pushing hard into podcasting since 2016. What changed?

The answer, I think, is slightly counterintuitive. And, like so much about the media landscape recently, it involves TikTok.

Ten years ago, near the beginning of the Serial-led (and in hindsight, sort of quaint) podcast boom, industry figures were puzzling over a long-standing question: Why doesn’t audio go viral? Videos were going viral, obviously, as were images, articles, and virtually anything else you could share on social-media platforms like Facebook. Theories varied: Were podcasts too long? Too hard to clip? Was audio fundamentally disconnected from the so-called viral internet? This wasn’t just an interesting problem — now that podcasting was attracting major investment, with attendant goals for growth, it was a missed opportunity and an industry crisis. Podcasters didn’t really crack it then, but there were clues. By the late 2010s, it was clear that publishing podcasts on YouTube was a viable audience strategy and used to great effect by podcasters like Rogan, who posted full episodes on the platform but saw actual growth from shorter clips that got traction among users and, crucially, in YouTube’s recommendation system.

Then, just as the 2010s podcasting bubble was about to peak, TikTok arrived. Here was a video-first platform that was basically only a recommendation engine, minus the pretense and/or burden of sociality — a machine for automating and allocating virality. Its rapid growth drove older, less vibrant social-media platforms wild with envy and/or panic. They all immediately copied it, refashioning themselves as algorithmic short-video apps almost overnight. Suddenly, on every social-media platform — including YouTube, which plugged vertical video “Shorts” into its interface and rewarded creators who published them with followers, attention, and money — there was a major new opportunity for rapid, viral growth. TikTok’s success (and imitation by existing megaplatforms) triggered a formal explosion in video content as millions of users figured out what sorts of short videos worked in this new context: Vine-like comedy sketches; dances; product recommendations; rapid-fire confessionals. The list expanded quickly and widely, but one surprising category broke through: podcast clips.

These clips were usually highlights, teases, punch lines, or moments of conflict that could briefly hold users’ attention. The dearth of social context on these new video platforms could work in podcasters’ favor: You encounter people in a studio, mid-conversation, laughing or scowling while they talk to each other about something. Why not hear them out for a few seconds? (A similar dynamic helped fuel the rise of TikTok crowdwork comedians: While their videos don’t look overproduced or professional, they show someone on a real stage, implying a real audience.) Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day noted last year that video podcast clips — people in Rogan-style studios or streamer-style rigs, or just sitting on a couch with handheld mics — were so effective on TikTok (and on Reels, and on Shorts) that people started faking them, releasing clips from shows that don’t actually exist. As for why people are doing this, Broderick suggested, the podcast microphone is “a way to visually signify that you’re important enough for someone to record you.” Audio was finally going viral — albeit in short clips, as video.

These clips aren’t just chum for TikTok. They’re genuinely effective marketing for real podcasts, provided casual social-media users can easily find and listen to the shows they’re sourced from. (Edison’s report on young podcast listeners notes that, in 2023, a majority of listeners were finding new podcasts through social media, mostly through apps with short-video functions.) This might mean tapping over to Spotify, where you can listen to or watch full episodes of a show or subscribe for future installments. Maybe it means opening up a conventional podcast app, searching for a show, subscribing to the show, and then finding and downloading the episode you were looking for. But the shortest path to a full podcast from TikTok or Instagram — or, obviously, from Shorts — runs through YouTube, an open platform that everyone already uses, which is perfectly positioned to recapture some of this new and abundant attentional by-product. (The story of Haliey Welch, a.k.a. Hawk Tuah Girl, traces a less deliberate but extreme version of a similar dynamic running in two different directions: A short, funny TikTok clip from a street interview with Welch went extremely viral, catapulting her to fame; her long-form podcast, Talk Tuah, manifested both to absorb and capitalize on sudden demand and to ensure a steady new supply of clippable moments for TikTok.)

While TikTok helps explain how we got here, it can’t tell us everything about where podcasting is going. Podcasting’s shift to video is interesting and broadly significant, but the most important change, as far as the industry is concerned, is probably the corresponding and slightly lagging shift to centrally controlled platforms like YouTube and Spotify. For years, podcasting’s independence from major tech companies was core to its identity: Most shows were distributed primarily through RSS feeds, hosted by their publishers, and listenable through whatever app users chose. This almost certainly hindered growth and might have prevented podcasts from “going viral,” but, in contrast to much of the surrounding media world, it also insulated them somewhat from the whims of companies like Facebook. Podcast audiences were slow to build, but, more than most media online, they were yours once you had them.

Now, a new generation of podcasters is crossing over. (Plenty of established podcasters, however, have mixed feelings about pivoting to video.) It’s a massive opportunity: Podcasters are still in a relatively good position to both find new audiences on social-media platforms and to meaningfully hold onto them as subscribers or paid patrons elsewhere. But if the independent ecosystem starts to wither and platform growth becomes the only viable way to build and reach an audience, podcasters will become, in material terms, more like YouTubers, TikTokers, and other influencers. They’ll be working not just in a new medium, but at the mercy of the platforms.

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