Media Briefing: Podcast publishers are using YouTube Shorts as a way to attract new audiences

This week’s Media Briefing looks at how publishers are finding new audiences for their podcast YouTube channels.

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Podcast discovery via Shorts

The key hits:

Podcast publishers are using YouTube Shorts as a marketing vehicle for their video podcasts.
Shorts contribute upwards of 40% of views to full-length episodes of Betches Media’s “U Up?” podcast on YouTube.

Given the early signals that Shorts can generate new audiences to podcasts, some publishers are considering creating promotional Shorts content for their shows before fully transitioning full-length podcasts into video.

YouTube Shorts has served as an audience acquisition funnel to creators’ long form videos on the platform for some time, but podcast publishers are finding that the 60-second-and-shorter videos are becoming a marketing vehicle to get new eyeballs on the full-length, often video-based podcasts episodes posted on their YouTube channels.

Shorts currently drives about 40% of the views to the YouTube channel for Betches Media’s “U Up?” podcast which at the time of publication only has about 6,800 subscribers on YouTube, compared to a monthly average of over 1 million downloads, per Betches, across all podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And as each YouTube video receives a couple thousand views on average, per channel data, the number of total views coming in from Shorts is really only a few hundred to a thousand per episode. But 90% of those Shorts viewers are new viewers to the ‘U Up?’ channel — aka viewers who haven’t visited the page in the last 90 days, according to David Spiegel, chief revenue officer of Betches Media.

“While [YouTube Shorts] is still an experiment, that type of exposure, you’ve got to assume, is worth something,” Spiegel said. And because of that belief, he added that his team “shift[ed] a lot of our strategy around podcast promotion towards short-form, vertical video,” not just on YouTube Shorts, but also on TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms.

As of now, there isn’t any data Betches Media can access to see whether those viewers are ultimately converting to podcast subscribers on other audio platforms, but Spiegel said that the general brand awareness opportunity has made this marketing strategy a focus this year for the company.

“If you just look at that pure, new viewership … I do think that it’s a necessary [marketing] vehicle,” Spiegel said. “I do see us [launching] short-form [videos] across more shows before we would launch a standalone YouTube channel [for other podcasts in their portfolio],” he added, optimistic that interested viewers would find the shows on podcast apps on their own.

One industry source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that right before their conversation with Digiday, they were on the phone with two clients of their who host podcasts, advising them that if they’re not currently using Shorts as a promotional tool for their …read more

Source:: Digiday