The Podverse
Do you listen to a podcast, or watch it? Video’s primacy in podcasting is gaining momentum. I look at the landscape.
The Colour Bar is where creativity, content, culture, tech, brands & humanity collide. This week, that means the sound & vision of culture try to co-exist, as podcasts find themselves in a new phase of evolution. That’s video, which continues to enter and disrupt every form, and platform.
Like much of Planet Earth (more than some realise and less than most assume), I have enjoyed the podcast wave from its early ripples, even been on a couple. They are diverse and versatile (and these two related but different traits have become increasingly significant in their recent evolution). They (can) offer nuance in a world of flat brushes. They invite an unusually intimate experience even with distant, dry or divisive subject matter. Of course, like any medium, they can get snared by agenda-pushing, algorithm-chasing, or bias. But this is not about that.
While podcasts have been much talked about in the past 12-18months, in recent weeks the volume has turned up a notch or three. Partly because of a tiny recent electoral event you might have heard of, dubbed ‘the Youtube election’ or ‘the podcast election’, depending on who’s talking. But also because the format is increasingly symbiotic with that platform. The simple point is that so many people around the world just do everything on Youtube- look up, learn, laugh, and listen.
Then this week, another platform- Spotify- has showed up, elbowing for a bigger slice of the video podcasting pizza. Their new set up will have many podcasters and networks thinking long and hard.
Before some perspectives on all this, I do have to say- very often a video podcast is just what (older) people called ‘an interview’ or a discussion. Some are much better listened than watched (I love the term “ I have a face for podcasts”), others genuinely benefit from an added visual element. But mostly, its the power of Youtube as a creator platform- monetisation, community, metrics- that has speedily driven the desire of an audio format looking to live on a video platform. Having said that, producing a video podcast is a different game than an audio one; if video is just going to be table stakes for podcasters, many smart & engaging minds could be discouraged or intimidated to even get into podcasting at all. I don’t like that prospect.
Into the podverse talks about how podcasting has been forced to grapple with its own adolescence. Now, it isn’t “just stretching its legs — it’s walking in new directions.” Appropriate analogy. · Natasha Randhawa ·
In the WSJ, Why Everyone Is Now Watching Podcasts on YouTube. "It’s a profound shift that suddenly has the world’s audio giants battling for supremacy in the increasingly valuable world of video podcasts.” (Also- WSJ, referring to Youtube as “a site whose core product used to be cat videos”, really? Its 2024, no?)
Youtube as a force in podcasts almost universally hailed. Almost. Danny Weisman thinks podcast viewing on YouTube will decrease in 2025. While James Bishop is quite clear that YouTube will dominate podcasting in 2025 because “creators are motivated by opportunities to grow, engage, and earn sustainably- and YouTube delivers on all three.”
Ashely Carman breaks down the Spotify incursion and vision really well here (you should be reading her newsletter for anything podcast related). “Spotify characterised advertisements as a pain point for its subscribers… the company found that podcasts increasingly include more ads. During a three-month period, ads first accounted for, on average, 8% of a podcast’s length and then jumped to about 11%.”
Unimpressed by it, Jamie East feels that this move from Spotify is “in essence the further removal of podcasting (in its traditional sense) as a medium, shoehorning it into the catchall ‘content’ tag”, and John McDermott says Spotify’s language just means “meet our monetization criteria”