Podcasts & Video: YouTube and Spotify Opportunities

What do you need to do to get video on their platforms?

All this week I’ve been posting (part 1, part 2, part 3) about why podcasters, particularly those producing long-form conversations, should think about their podcasts as shows and deliver them in the places and platforms that today’s consumers want to get them. Of course that should be in Spotify or Apple Podcasts, but shows should also be retooled to work on video platforms like YouTube.

As I talked about yesterday, retooling your production process for video can be a challenge, but it also opens up lots of questions about monetisation too. The platforms are very much marching to the beat of their own drum and not yours. So, what do you need to think about?

Well, everyone’s mileage varies, depending on what type of business model they have. If you don’t have dynamically inserted ads, or the revenue from it is pretty small, then you’re pretty fortunate. If you do, everything gets more complicated.

One of the real benefits of podcasting has been the evolving ad model. If you use a network like Acast, Audioboom or DAX, when you upload your show you mark where you want the ads to go, alongside deciding if you want there to be pre-rolls (before your content) and post-rolls (after it). Taking all of this together, shows normally have at least three ad breaks, with around three ads in each break.

As a content creator you don’t have to worry about the ads, the network sells the ads for you (alongside other podcasts) and dynamically inserts them into your show. Each listener could get a unique set of ads depending on where they are and when they download the show. The networks tend to sell a mix of spot-ads - 30 second commercials - and live reads (sometimes called sponsorships). Live reads are where the host reads out a sell for a sponsor. Normally now, whether a spot ad or a live read, the message is inserted dynamically into the episode for the listener.

The podcast app is generally quite dumb. It looks at an RSS feed for each show and that includes a link to (usually) an MP3 file on a server. It merely goes to that link and downloads the file. The clever bit is done on your network’s server. When the file is requested, the network stitches together your episode with the relevant ads and sends it back to the app for you to listen to. This is often called ‘pass-thru’ as the app gets a new file each time for each user. It doesn’t store it on its own servers as that would mean everyone would get the same mix of ads as the first time it was downloaded, also if that happened, your network wouldn’t know how many downloads there were and how to charge the advertisers.

In the early years, a few apps, including Spotify for a while, didn’t do pass thru and content creators caused enough of a stink for them all to give in. Often their reasons were good ones, they perhaps wanted to give a better experience by streaming files from their own servers rather than third party ones. But anyway the practice fizzled out. This meant that anyone listening to your show on any app got dynamic ads and a podcaster could earn some money.

Some shows are popular on all podcast apps, some are more popular on specific ones. Spotify, for example, tends to do better with younger shows and Apple with older ones. However, generally, about 70% of a show’s listening comes from Apple or Spotify with the remaining coming from apps like Pocketcasts, Overcast, Castbox or Amazon Music.

Google’s foray into podcasting most recently was with Google Podcasts, a very good, simple, Android app. Last year it entered the Google Graveyard as the platform wanted to push podcast listening to its YouTube Music app. At the same time it wanted to make what I’ll call Normal YouTube, ie the video one, a home for podcasting more generally.

YouTube has always had success with big podcasters, particularly those who started on the platform. Audio-only podcasters comprise a large number of creators often making long-form material every week. They’re a perfect target for YouTube. That’s exactly the type of material they would like, in video form. They also have an established ad network in YouTube Ads that can monetise that video content.

One of its challenges is YouTube Music and Normal YouTube are quite different products that use the same catalogue as material. They decided to treat podcasts in a similar way to music. Content owners are encouraged to upload their material, audio only with an image is fine, though they’d rather you put full video on, and just like music, they added some special metadata to signal to them that you are a podcast. On a simple level this is so they can put podcast search alongside music search.

The main thing YouTube wants you to do is replicate your RSS feed on their platform. You can do this two ways, the first is you upload your episode as a video file. This could be a full video experience or just the audio with a static image. You then put it in a special podcast playlist. You can do this manually or there’s an automated option.

The automated option takes your RSS feed and when YouTube sees you have a new episode it converts it to a video, with a static image, and adds it to a podcast playlist.

The second option is easy, but the least useful. Normal YouTube’s content discovery algorithms use a ranking of the likelihood a viewer will watch some content. It uses all the signals it has ranging from the thumbnail click thru percentage, to watch time to decide what it promotes. A thumbnail based on a static episode image, a less engaging title and then a video with no, er video, is unlikely to give an episode enough points to be promoted.

However, that’s not to say it’s a pointless exercise, you’re still available in search, and for people who’ve subscribed to your channel’s feeds. For people that know you and want your content, or for those who maybe have subscribed in the YouTube Music app, it’s a way to deliver on the promise “get us wherever you get your podcasts”.

The New York Times’ The Daily uploads most of its videos with static images with not great thumbnails and they do about 10k of views a day. Now bear in mind they’re one of the world’s biggest podcasts. Where they did a regular episode, about the Presidential Transition and Musk, in full video (though still with a poor thumbnail) it did 50k. YouTube, and its users, like full video.

One of the challenges with YouTube are its advertising rules. It does not permit any ad products that it sells itself. So for podcasters you can’t ‘burn in’ a 30 second spot ad (as they sell those) but you can do a sponsor-style live-read. When you add your RSS feed (for auto importing) it instructs you not to do it if your feed has dynamic ads in. If you ignored this and pasted the feed in any way, YouTube would go off and grab it, with your dynamic ads, and then convert it into a video. However, the video wouldn’t have pass-thru. It would have literally taken a single episode with whatever was in it and then provided that to all users in video form.

So we’re at our first quandary. If you’re someone who makes money from the dynamic ads, your listeners on YouTube won’t get them, so as a default any YouTube views won’t be monetised. If you have 1,000 subscribers at 4,000 hours of watch time (over a year) then you can join YouTube’s ad programme, which will give you a RPM of between £1 and £4 per view. This is likely less than the CPM from your podcast network. However you might have higher views, they might do a better job of filling the ad spots - it’s hard to know as it depends very much on your channel.

Your podcast network may also have some rules about whether you can put the content on YouTube in the first place.

Potentially you may move a higher paying listener from the podcast to a lower paying listener on YouTube. But then again you may bring in a new audience on YouTube and make some new money. I think it’s more likely to be the latter, but that’s hard to know.

If you do go down the YouTube route, to maximise your chance of success, you may need to replicate the strategies successful channels use. This tends to be more single topic content, with engaging thumbnails and titles and good quality, well-produced video. To do well you may need to rethink the structure of your content and decide whether that will run across both YouTube and podcast, or whether you create differentiated versions.

The opportunities on YouTube are significant, but they do require some thought. Auto-importing your podcast feed and hoping for the best, whilst at least getting your content into their system, the chances of it being particularly organically successful on Normal YouTube is fairly slim.

Meanwhile over at Spotify they’re also very keen to get you uploading video for your show.

At the moment you add your RSS feed to Spotify Creators for your audio show and it lists your podcast in their directory, respecting pass-thru for your audio ads. To add video, once it’s seen you have a new episode it will list it in Spotify Creators, you then select the option to upload an MP4. It then processes it pretty quickly and the video then appears on your podcast channel. When a user hits play they get the video version, or they can minimise that and get the audio version - great! Well…

At the point you upload the video version, Spotify stops using the audio on your regular RSS feed and instead takes the audio from your video. It does this partly so that people can flick between the audio and video versions. If it didn’t it might find it hard to match the two. However, by doing this it means it no longer takes the RSS audio version with your dynamic ads, so no more audio ad revenue from Spotify.

So your decision to upload is whether you think it’s more important to deliver a video version to Spotify’s users, or more important to get the revenue from your dynamic ads.

If you don’t make much money from the ads, or don’t have them, the decision is obviously much easier. All being equal - why wouldn’t you give users the options of having both video and audio? But clearly the money, particularly for larger shows, would be quite the thing to give up.

Spotify themselves have just announced a new partner programme. If you have 10,000 streamed hours on Spotify in a month and at least 2,000 unique listeners and are in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, then you can join. This will give you 50% of the revenue of any ads sold plus a yet-to-be-defined income from Spotify’s premium customers based on how much they stream from your shows.

It’s much more akin to YouTube’s partnership system than the traditional audio ad network one. There is a catch though, you need to host your show with Spotify (or its enterprise platform Megaphone).

So your choice is either stay with your current network, and decide whether or not to offer video for free and lose the ad money (or stick as an audio-only show). Or move to Spotify and get money from traditional podcast ads on other platforms, managed by Spotify alongside getting video-specific money from Spotify for this new partner programme.

If I was making an ad-funded podcast that had both audio and video, I would be open to this option. But my core questions would be:

1. Whether Spotify could match the audio ad money my current network was providing (for all the people listening on Apple Podcasts etc). In other words, how good were their audio CPMs?

2. What’s the additional revenue I’m likely to generate from the new video partner programme on Spotify

3. And would one and two be more than I was getting at the moment

If I chose to do the Spotify thing, I’d probably be choosing to do the YouTube thing too, especially as I’d already done the really hard bit of making my show in video form.

If the numbers add up, and I’m sure it’ll vary person to person, network to network, this could be a good thing. My show would be available in audio and video in all the main places where people want to get it, and I’d have two sets of ad income - one from Spotify and one from YouTube.

If the numbers don’t really add up - let’s say you’re getting a really good CPM from your audio only ad network, then you're in a bit of limbo. You should probably still do YouTube, as I would imagine the revenue is mainly additional, but for Spotify, if you’ve got a decent amount of audio listeners, and no way to monetise the video, then you’re probably a bit stuck.

The Spotify Partner Programme is less than a week old, so it’s too early to jump to many conclusions. Is this the final version of it? What will their CPMs be like? What will users think about video on Spotify, will they use it? Of course, it opens up lots of questions for ad networks like Acast and Audioboom, they can only sell ads to apps that take their ad-injected feeds.

In the old pass thru world, it was easy for podcast creators, they made one audio show and let the ad network do the selling. This is quite different to the web, where websites have ad networks competing for ad slots in constantly running dynamic auctions.

In the new world you can choose to keep your podcast audio only, it will be easy, and your ad network will continue to do the heavy lifting, but will you find your growth limited on a audio-only platform that faces more competition for consumer’s time from the video platforms?

Alternatively you may re-tool your show to be audio and video and take your luck by splitting your ad inventory a couple of different ways? You may have more potential to grow, but it requires more work and effort and you are somewhat at the mercy of what Spotify and YouTube do in the future.

I wish there were some easy answers. Sadly, there are not. What should you do? Well it depends! Personally, whilst the monetisation options start to shake out, I would work to re-tool your show to work in both video and audio. If you’ve got a limited budget, what can you do step-by-step to get there? Similarly how do you build out your other platforms, things like social and web/email. Your best chances will come from having flexibility. The best chance of success will come from delivering the right content on the right platform to the right consumers - you can never go wrong by doing the right thing for them.

That’s it from me. This is the 4th part of a series, the other parts are here: part 1, part 2, part 3. Do subscribe to get more posts about the podcast, streaming and radio world.

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