Here’s how dominant YouTube really is in podcasting

All roads in podcasting lead to thinking about YouTube, and I had a chance to check in with Podtrac’s Mark McCrery about the company’s new ranking that includes YouTube views. The ranking provides some insight into what is doing well on YouTube versus traditional RSS platforms.

From the data available in the first month’s ranking, corporate production outfits are getting much more out of YouTube than creator content, which is not necessarily what I expected given that YouTube is thought of primarily as a creator platform. For Libsyn, which hosts many creator podcasts, only about 7 percent of streams come from YouTube. Whereas for a legacy entertainment brand like Paramount, YouTube views make up the majority of streams.

I asked McCrery more about how the new ranker works and what other takeaways he had from the debut list.

When did you decide that the ranking needed to include YouTube views?

Over the past year, we’ve seen more and more interest in understanding YouTube’s impact on podcasting. And we’ve seen, on an individual podcast basis, significant views from podcasts on YouTube. Publishers and networks told us that capturing their YouTube counts would provide a more complete picture of their podcast distribution footprint, which is helpful to advertisers and other industry partners. In Podtrac’s rankings, we’ve always captured all of the ways audiences are getting their podcasts: Apple, Spotify, other podcatchers, podcast websites — and now, YouTube.

Did the prior ranking include any YouTube views?

This is the first time the Podtrac rankings have included YouTube views.

Is there any doubling over between YouTube views and podcast downloads on apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify?

We’ve heard from publishers and their listeners anecdotally that some people may discover a show on RSS as audio and then switch over to YouTube after they learn it’s also published in video, or they come across a video podcast on YouTube and then find it on Apple or Spotify. So, when they’re new to the show, they may also be deciding how and when they want to listen or watch, and they probably resolve that to a single platform over time.

From a technical measurement perspective, the IAB Podcast [Technical] Working Group defines a podcast episode download unique to each user agent, and Apple, Spotify, and YouTube each have their own, so RSS downloads and YouTube views for the same content are additive.

Once you started calculating those results, did anything surprise you?

So far, per the ranking, three of the publishers and networks listed are posting about a third of their RSS audio podcasts to YouTube as video episodes, and they’re getting about a third or more traffic to their content as a result. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the months to come based on the content publishers choose to post there or changes to ways people get their podcasts on YouTube.

Also, publishers often find that short clips on YouTube get more views than full episodes. So YouTube can be effective for discovery, which likely results in new audiences to full episodes over time. For now, we’re focusing on content on YouTube that matches what’s in the audio RSS feed, so we only count full episodes — not the short clips.

You have been putting together these metrics for years now. How is YouTube changing the podcast space in terms of metrics?

We’ve aligned YouTube’s available metrics as best we can to available RSS metrics. The most basic metric we have on every other platform is a podcast download (or a stream start). On YouTube, it’s a view, so we’re adding those together for a “Downloads + Views” metric. Audience metrics (unique viewers across episodes) on YouTube are a little more challenging at present, but that is something we hope to resolve in time.

Do you think YouTube is going to increase in dominance in the space?

Personality-driven full-video podcasts perform well on YouTube. Perhaps if YouTube continues to expand its podcast footprint, it’s going to come from video-first podcasters who have content that also translates to audio — or if YouTube finds a way to get more of its music listeners to listen to audio podcasts. It will be interesting to see how YouTube counts in the Podtrac rankings evolve over time.