[column] Podcast creator? Don’t miss out on YouTube opportunities!

YouTube is ‘secretly’ very big in podcasts and that will only increase with their plans. How can you make the most of these opportunities?
According to it Podcast 360 Report from data & insights company Luminate, YouTube is the most popular platform in America to listen to podcasts. YouTube is also becoming increasingly popular in the Netherlands as a place to listen to and watch podcasts. For example, the search volume on YouTube for podcasts in the Netherlands has increased by more than 100% in one year. They want to expand that popularity further.

Videopodcasts
YouTube now focuses almost exclusively on video podcasts, but that is about to change. According to leaked internal plans, it will soon be possible to upload podcasts automatically, just like on other audio platforms. YouTube also wants to recommend podcasts better and more often to users and the platform is willing to give podcast makers money for producing – exclusive – content. In addition, YouTube allows major podcast publishers to create their own ad inventory sell on YouTube. 2023 will be the year of YouTube’s definitive breakthrough as a podcast platform.

What determines success on YouTube?
Despite its popularity, YouTube is an underestimated publishing platform for many podcast creators. What should you do to change that? How do you achieve success? Many YouTube tips you find online are about adding tags, changing the filename for seo purposes, posting channel banners or to call on viewers to like and comment subscribe. All well and good, but these factors affect the success of your channel for exactly 0.001%.
But what is important then? If you study the world’s most successful YouTube creators in depth – as I like to do – there are five key factors. Success on YouTube is largely determined by:

1 The chosen topics
2 Viewer loyalty
3 The packaging (titles & thumbnails)
4 The distribution
5 Continue verbetering (marginal gains theory)

Combine this with the popular advice in Rotterdam that it should mainly be about deeds rather than words and you will come a long way.
Three practical tips to immediately achieve more results:

1 Pay much more attention to your titles & thumbnails. It will soon be possible to automatically upload podcasts to YouTube via RSS feeds. Easy, but then realize that your content is far from optimal. It is almost always advisable to pay (more) attention to your titles & thumbnails. These two elements largely determine whether interested people click and therefore start listening to your show at all. So it’s no surprise that the world’s most successful creators are obsessed with thumbnail optimization. Provide a recognizable and clear look & feel, but also one that differs per episode.

2 Analyze where viewers/listeners drop off and why. Next to CTR (Click Through Rate), viewer loyalty is the most important metric for success. YouTube gives videos and podcasts insight into the performance of content at the second level. Take advantage of that. You can see exactly where your target audience is dropping off and how you perform relative to other content of the same length. Use these insights to find out why your listeners are dropping out so you can improve the next episode. The most successful creators are not distinguished from the rest by the number of uploads. More is not always better. They do improve with every upload. No matter how small the improvement, in the end it all counts marginal gains and make a big impact.

3 Go Short. YouTube Shorts (“the TikTok equivalent of YouTube”) are extremely popular and can boost a channel’s visibility and growth. See if you can edit the best quotes and highlights from an episode as a short vertical video and post it as Short. A good example of this is 7DTV, a Dutch YouTube and podcast channel where Ronnie Overgoor talks to entrepreneurs. He publishes highlights and short excerpts from the episodes as Short. The result: hundreds of thousands of views, a significant increase in subscribers and the entire episode is viewed better.

This breakthrough of podcasts on YouTube offers great opportunities for podcast creators. Start the year off right by responding to this now.

This article originally appeared in MarketingTribune 01, 2023.