Tweak #16: Put your podcast on YouTube (and do it well)
YouTube will do wonders for you, as long as you treat it right.
Event announcement! This week, I’m hosting a livestream with Jay Acunzo to celebrate the launch of his new podcast, How Stories Happen. I’ll be interviewing Jay to dissect the tiny choices and reveal the existential crises behind Jay's creation of the all-important first episode of a new show. If you like the Weekly Tweak, I think you’ll get a lot out of this event! It’s happening Thursday, 12–1pm ET. Register here for free.
This isn’t the first time I’ve used this newsletter to talk about why being on YouTube is good for your audience numbers. In brief:
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
YouTube has algorithms and recommendation engines to put your show in front of new viewers, something traditional podcast apps don’t have.
A Sounds Profitable study found that most people who consume podcasts on YouTube also consume podcasts on podcast apps—they’re not some alien breed of audience.
Yet, you’ll often see podcasters who try their hand at YouTube complain about how little of an audience it gets them. Not to blame the victim, but I think 99% of the time this happens, it’s either that they’re doing YouTube wrong or they actually have a great audience on YouTube and they’re thinking about the numbers wrong. I’ll explain in a second.
But first, the basics.
How to get your audio podcast on YouTube
To get your podcast on YouTube, you don’t need to do video (though it helps). YouTube now has an RSS ingestion feature that can automatically publish your audio episodes as videos with a static image of your podcast or episode art. You can learn more about how to do that here.
How to optimize your podcast’s YouTube channel
This is the first way I think most podcasters go wrong with YouTube. I don’t blame them. They’ve been living in a world where the best podcast packaging on Apple Podcasts is also the best podcast packaging on Spotify, and Pocket Casts, and every other podcast app. There’s never been a reason to change a title or image for a specific platform, so why do it for YouTube?
YouTube is different. It’s got a different visual language than podcast apps do—people browse in different ways and click for different reasons.
It’s also easy to forget that your entire channel on YouTube is customizable—unlike the way your show art automatically pushes out to your show page on every podcast app, on YouTube, you can tailor your banner, profile picture, and even channel name so it attracts a YouTube-specific audience.
And that makes a difference. I’m proof. Here’s an audience graph showing what happened when I added video (a negligible difference) and then when I optimized my show’s YouTube page (a massive difference).
Here’s what I did, and what you should do—even if YouTube is automatically publishing your episodes through RSS (after all, you can always edit the title and thumbnail after the fact):
Added a custom YouTube banner with my show name and tagline
Marked my podcast trailer as the channel trailer
Created a playlist for the podcast (if you’re using RSS, this should already exist)
Created custom, YouTube-friendly thumbnails for every episode. Here’s a guide on how to do that.
To use an example from a YouTuber-turned-podcaster (i.e., a YouTube native), check out the difference in the way Tom Scott’s Lateral podcast packages their audio episodes and their video episodes. (Yes, that’s me with Sam Reich! Adam Savage was also there! I was very excited but kept my cool!)
Lateral publishes clips of the show, not full episodes, but the principle is the same. The YouTube thumbnail has pictures of people’s faces reacting to something (which draws your eye), while the podcast episode art just features a stock image on the branded background. (I think they could have done even more with the YouTube title, but I am not going to tell Tom Scott how to do his job, and 43K views means he’s doing something right).
Why “low” view numbers might be a lie
Say you’ve put your podcast on YouTube, you’ve optimized everything, and you’re still not seeing MrBeast-level numbers. For the sake of math, let’s say you tend to get 1000 downloads per episode on your audio-only show, and you’re only getting around 100 views on your YouTube videos. What’s going wrong?
Nothing is going wrong. You’re just thinking about YouTube as its own channel, and not as one part of your podcast’s entire audience ecosystem.
Let me explain. When I look at my podcast host’s analytics for Taboo Science, I see that Spotify makes up 34% of all of my downloads. Apple Podcasts makes up 21%, and at a distant third is a tie between the smaller apps like Podcast Addict and Pocket Casts at around 6–8%. Your top platforms will be different, but the percentages will be familiar.
If my hypothetical podcast is getting a total of 1000 downloads per episode and I’m getting 100 views per YouTube video, that means that YouTube is my third most successful platform. 10% of your download numbers is nothing to sneeze at!
In conclusion
Put your podcast on YouTube, even if it’s an automatic RSS upload. Customize your channel so it looks like somebody’s home. Then fold YouTube thumbnails into your design workflow (you are making custom art for each episode, right?), tweak the YouTube titles to be a little more clicky, and see what happens. Then take the numbers in context. Let me know how it goes.
Oooh yes! Were you at the YouTube Podcasts 101 session last week?