YouTube to ‘increase discoverability’

YouTube has released a video giving more detail on the rollout of its new podcast features.

Users will benefit from podcast-specific search results to offer “increased discoverability” and podcast-specific analytics including “insights on how viewers find your podcast”. YouTube will also supply demographics data to help give feedback on a show’s reach.

The video-sharing platform is already considered to be an excellent discovery tool because it is effectively the second-biggest search engine after Google.

Content that is classified as a podcast will be made available to YouTube Music users and, as we reported last month, a key aspect is that content will be eligible for audio-only playback within the app – meaning users can listen to it with the screen locked and therefore consume it on the go or while doing something else (as is so often the preference for podcast listening). 

Watch the video from YouTube here.

Video to the fore in major Spotify revamp 

Spotify has announced a significant revamp of its mobile app that puts more focus on visuals, and particularly video. Features that were limited to Anchor users, such the ability to publish video podcasts and use Q&A and polling tools, are now being made available to all. The new home screen – described by The Verge as “part TikTok, part Instagram, part YouTube” – is a scrolling interface that automatically plays previews of shows and has separate feeds for music, podcasts and audiobooks.

The new Spotify for Podcasters was revealed earlier this month at Spotify’s Stream On event as part of what CEO Daniel Ek described as “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile 10 years ago”. 

Ek added: “From audio to video, we are giving you the resources to grow your audience by arming you with better tools.”

Podcast listening time has ‘doubled since 2015’ 

In good news for those worried about battling for ears and market saturation, a new survey reports that not only is the overall number of podcast listeners continuing to rise but that regular listeners are spending more time listening.

The Podcast Consumer 2023, a report from The Infinite Dial, a respected survey of digital media consumer behaviour in the United States that has been running for 25 years, claims the average time spent listening to podcasts has doubled since 2015 – from 4hrs 27min to 9hrs 3min – among weekly listeners aged 12 or over. 

The survey showed that weekly podcast listeners had listened to an average of nine podcast episodes in the week preceding the survey (January 2023), up from eight episodes in 2022.

Findings from The Podcast Consumer 2023, which is produced by Edison Research, showed that 64% of Americans aged 12 or over had listened to a podcast, 42% had listened to a podcast in the past month, and 31% in the past week – all record highs.