This is not an article singularly stating “YouTube is great for discoverability” nor is it positioning the question, “is a video a podcast?.”

Perhaps I’m just too cynical, but there is a lot of buzzword-borne content, and very rarely does any of that content say anything beyond the buzzwords.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do believe that YouTube is great for discoverability, but I think it’s important to deepen the conversation and talk about how and why, in particular for podcasts (as the medium continues to rapidly evolve). What I also want to note is that there are far more interesting opportunities when using YouTube as a platform, and I will also be discussing those.

So, now that you know exactly what you’ll get out of reading this article, let’s get to it.

Yes, Discoverability

The answer is yes. This is a huge benefit of getting your stuff on YouTube in any form. But why?

YouTube is Mining for Your Perfect Audience

YouTube works for you, it wants to find an audience that will like your content. It’s mutually beneficial so they work pretty hard at it too. Once you post a video, YouTube will do an initial push to a sample of audiences it thinks will enjoy the content. This is where it gets tricky though, in that initial push, if it doesn’t find the audience, it won’t keep trying. You essentially have 24 hours and if it doesn’t get picked up, every passing day that probability will drop exponentially. 

But if it does find an audience that it determines likes the content, it will start looking deeper into segments of that audience or adjacent audiences and try to find the perfect fit. It will continue to keep pushing the more success it finds, and that’s why when something takes off, it’s pretty exponential.

There’s a double win here too: Not only are you potentially getting blasted out to a ton of new viewers, you’re also getting to see in data which demographics your content is resonating with. 

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, I do want to give some hope for the “flops”. YouTube doesn’t really ever give up completely; it just scales back its effort a ton. But it will keep trying a little… and every now and then, that little bit of effort is enough.

Here’s a real-life personal example. When I was earlier in my career, I decided I wanted to make a YouTube channel about a topic I was interested in at the time. I made three videos, put them out over three weeks, and none of them broke 20 views, so with a mixture of disappointment and moving on to the next shiny thing, I gave up. A year later, I randomly checked on the channel and saw that the very first video I posted now had a million views, and it had all happened within the month. So while rare, old videos still have potential, as long as the content is quality–or relevant– and there is an audience out there for it. 

Here’s the last thing I’ll say specifically about discoverability: everything depends on your goals.

YouTube opens the floodgates to start focusing on vanity metrics or chasing the highs of big numbers. But what actually matters is how YouTube can help you reach your specific goals. Which means that even if discoverability is an added benefit, your main purpose for being on YouTube (or creating video content at all) may not be widening the funnel. And that means your content strategy may look entirely different than another podcast on YouTube.

So, with that said, it’s time to talk about the other opportunities that aren’t in the buzzword cycle. 

Community and Feedback

Here’s something that sucks about RSS technology: your community is segmented and mostly silent. You put something out there, and in most cases, the extent to which you hear back is just vague “download” numbers. Sure, there are some other stats to parse through, but because the platforms can’t agree on which stats to collect or what they mean, a lot of the data is guesswork and doesn’t paint a very clear picture. 

Commenting gives the qualitative data / Comments give you the feedback you need

A lot of podcast players don’t have commenting capabilities, and the ones that do tend to have pretty lonely comment sections (Yeah, I’m looking at you Spotify). Since the dawn of YouTube, the comment section has been a core feature and perhaps part of the draw… for better or for worse. Creators on YouTube are often having active lively discussions directly with their audience, and even if they don’t directly get involved, their community is talking amongst themselves.

Communities are valuable. But if you want to build one solely based on your RSS feed, you need to add an extra step for listeners to leave their segmented listening platform and join a shared third-party space;which also means you need to build that space and manage it. On YouTube, the community feature is built right in, and you don’t have to do anything.

And the other great thing about having a direct, frictionless line to your audience is that you can talk to them, and engagement can be less one-sided. Take suggestions for content, get feedback, learn the specific parts of episodes that people are enjoying or learning from, etc., etc., etc. 

There’s also a ton of opportunity with pinned posts. You can ask questions you specifically want to know from your audience, you can foster engagement by asking thoughtful questions related to the content, and you can even pin your CTA and links to your site, newsletter, etc., etc.

I’ll leave a caveat here: in both a beneficial and non-beneficial way, YouTube audiences do tend to differ from audio. Growth on YouTube does not appear to cannibalize audio listeners and vice versa. Which means if your goal is to also grow and maintain a healthy audio-only listenership, all of the data and feedback you collect must be balanced with what you also know about that audience, so as to not neglect and lose their trust and attention. But all of that depends on your goals with your content, and specific strategies should be developed first by understanding those goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Testing Topic Performance 

The culture of RSS is this: on your regular cadence at your regular time, you will post your next episode. That episode will be exactly the format your audience has come to expect. In return, you will slowly build a loyal audience that adds you into their routine, and will at some point throughout that time between the posted episode and the next one, they will listen to that episode. It’s stable, it’s predictable. YouTube doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s still important to find your niche and meet expectations, but by utilizing the direct feedback, clear statistics, and the algorithmic “mining”, there is a lot of opportunity to experiment and try new formats, packaging, and topics. 

What this looks like in practice

There are endless things you could experiment with, but one I will highlight here is with the Lower Street “episodette” strategy. Episodettes are repackaged specific microtopics mined from the long-form version of your show (either audio only or video, though we’d produce video for the episodette regardless). I could go on about that, but that’s a whole different conversation. But feel free to ask me about it on LinkedIn.

With frequent episodette content, you could mine your episodes for different angles on topics, different categories of topics, etc., and track what resonates and what doesn’t.

• For example, say your full episode was about finding the right cat breed for you. In that episode you’ll have talked about a lot of great stuff, so maybe you pull a few different videos such as:
  • Why are orange cats the cutest?
  • What you need to know before you get a long haired cat?
  • Why it’s so difficult to adopt a Maine Coon?
• Depending on response, you may learn that providing “what you need to know” checklist style packaging will perform well, or perhaps that orange cats is a specific topic that your audience wants more content about. 
• What’s fun about YouTube is that if you have discovered something that works, you can repeat it over and over and it will likely continue to work. Creators are often in loops of experimentation to discover new formats/topics that hit, and then going hard on one that does until it doesn’t anymore, which may be a very, very long time. So if you have found something that breaks into the algorithm… you’re hopping on a jet stream.

I’ll cut myself off there, but there are lot’s other testing opportunities on YouTube that wouldn’t be appropriate on RSS. Though let me say it again… it all depends on your specific goals.

Audience Confirmation

We’ve come to my final major point, though no less valuable than those that came before.

YouTube Analytics is a powerful tool. There is really an overwhelming amount of data. You will not use it all. 

However, it helps see hyper specific information about the type of audience you are reaching. It could tell you you’re hitting exactly who you want to. But it could also tell you that despite having a large audience, it’s the wrong one. A big audience is a bad audience if it’s not valuable in helping you reach your goals. And aside from just analytics, you can also track qualitative data in the comment section. Data from your RSS feed, on the other hand, is a lot more ambiguous.

RSS and Audio-Only Is Still Valuable

I’ve said a lot here that makes it sound like I don’t respect the power of the RSS feed. The truth is, I do. And I think audio-first content is extremely powerful. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have spent the last decade working in audio content. What I want to communicate here is that each version of podcasting has its unique benefits and opportunities. These are the ones I’m excited for for YouTube specifically. RSS would need it’s own article, so I’ll cut myself off there. 

The very last thing I want to say is perhaps the most important part of this entire article: none of this matters if you aren’t creating content that feels native to the platform you are seeking benefits from. Developing a solid strategy behind translating your audio first content to video first content is incredibly important, and it starts with identifying your goals. I hope this article gives you some inspiration to think about how a video strategy can help your own specific goals.