Audience Development

Should I Put My Podcast on YouTube?

Common Client Questions

This is the start of a new series at Pacific Content, Common Client Questions. We want to start with one of the most common questions we are getting these days: Should I Put My Podcast on YouTube?

Of course you should!

Back in September, Google announced it would be shutting down its podcast platform, to be replaced by YouTube Music. For some of our clients, Google Podcasts was a not-insignificant share of their podcast listener base, and there are some superfans who love(d) the platform. Around the same time, there was much chatter about YouTube becoming a clear leader in podcast discovery and so our clients wanted to know if a change in distribution strategy was warranted. Google Podcasts will cease functioning in some markets this month, so if you are thinking about your strategy, read on.

Since YouTube Music is replacing Google Podcasts, we are advising our clients to put their podcasts on YouTube first as it will automatically land on the YouTube Music app too. As YouTube is a video platform, and it’s very likely your podcast is audio only, it was tricky to put your podcast on the platform without some work involved. Anyone who has followed the video-or-podcasts story closely will know there were a number of false starts and dashed hopes for an easy way to link your podcast RSS feed to YouTube. But that is now a reality. Today, we can offer clear advice on how to put your podcast on YouTube through RSS, and what some of the expectations and limitations are.

Three things to keep in mind:

1. Your podcast MP3 file (audio-only) has to be converted to be an MP4 file (video) so that it can be uploaded to YouTube. You can do this automatically through the YouTube RSS connection, which uses static podcast art as a visual, or you can make a fancier version using all kinds of software, from free ones to more robust tools. Some podcast hosting platforms now have an additional place to upload YouTube specific-sized art (1920 x 1080 with a 16:9 aspect ratio).
2. When you designate the video as a podcast, a new tab will appear on your channel amongst the Videos, Shorts, Playlist and Community tabs: Podcasts. If your YouTube channel already has a healthy following, you can use this to signal to your audience that you have a podcast. Even if your followers don’t actually listen to the podcast on YouTube, now at least they know that you have one.
3. There isn’t yet a mechanism to track if someone discovers your podcast on YouTube and then listens to it over on another podcast platform. But if you are in the business of growing your audience, it doesn’t matter how they found the show– just that they did!

Option #1: Connect Your Podcast RSS Feed to Your YouTube Channel

If you don’t already have your podcast on the platform, YouTube has (finally) made it simple for you to connect your RSS feed. That means when you publish a new podcast episode, YouTube will pull in that episode automatically (like other platforms do) and use your show art to turn the file into a video.

The step by step instructions on how to do that in your Creator Studio.

A few limitations:

• When you check your podcast hosting provider, the views on YouTube will not show up in your downloads. YouTube pings your server just once when it connects, so it counts as one download. In order to get a full picture of your audience, you need to look at the views and engagement stats from YouTube Creator Studio and add that to the data from your hosting provider.
• The rules about how you can monetize your podcast through YouTube are evolving quickly, so you’ll want to check what is allowed when it comes to dynamically inserted audio, “baked in” and host read ads (here’s a current link as of this writing.)

Option #2: Create a Video Version of Your Podcast For YouTube

I’m not talking about making your podcast into a vodcast, as that is a completely different question (and production process). However, if you don’t want a static image from your artwork on your podcast, you can use a third party app to make your audio into a video, and then create a podcast playlist through your YouTube Creator Studio. Instructions on how to do that are here. If you are already making videos for social media or other platforms, it may make sense to do this here as well.

A few limitations:

• This takes more time, and you may not get the payoff you want from the extra effort to make a video. We have found that engagement rates with static artwork or audiograms (which would include a waveform and possibly some transcription) are lower on YouTube than when there is what we would think of as a video component of your podcast. If it looks like a chat show or has video clips edited together over the audio, as in, you’ve made it a visual production, it will perform better than audio with video you just put there to make it into an MP4.
• If you start with some video and then switch to a wave form or static image, you may see a drop off in your audience. Start as you mean to go on, so if you are promising your audience a video, you should follow through.

In Audience Development at Pacific Content, we want to find the right audience for your podcast. With so many people looking for content on YouTube, and the way YouTube search works to recommend content based on what its algorithm thinks you are looking for, it just makes sense for brands to distribute their audio here, and everywhere your audience might be.