The Trade-Offs of Video Podcasting on Spotify

Cinematic music plays, a heartbeat thumps, and Doug Downs launches into a dramatic story. In the middle of high-risk heart surgery, he tells us, a massive power outage has struck New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. In a crisis scenario like this, how do people rise to the challenge?

This is how Doug likes to open his PR & marketing podcast, Stories and Strategies. It’s how he differentiates his podcast from others in the same space, setting up the themes of a more conventional interview to follow.

“That whole theater of the mind thing is where audio shines,” he says. “You could walk through the Antarctic. You could suddenly be in Vietnam with bullets flying overhead … From my surveys, it’s ‘the podcast with the story.’ That’s how people describe it.”

If you want to hear his Mount Sinai story, you can find it at the top of this episode ”wherever you listen to podcasts” … well, except Spotify.

Lacking the resources to tell this same story as a video, Doug uploaded the video of just the interview segment to Spotify. He was surprised to find that it replaced the whole episode, for all Spotify users. Even for subscribers who prefer to listen to the audio, the video’s audio track had become the only version available.

“I guess naïvely, I thought the audio episode would still go through,” Doug says. “And that’s not the case.”

The full episode, with the story, is still available on all other platforms, which pull the episode from the Stories and Strategies open RSS feed.

A Spotify spokesperson explained that this “video replace” feature is designed for the “best playback experience” for users who want to switch between audio and video consumption. “To do that, we must use the same file,” they said.

Video matters

Spotify is so popular — it’s the most-used streaming audio platform, according to Edison Research’s 2024 Infinite Dial — that podcasters ought to care about how their shows are represented there.

In a press release, the company characterized video as a competitive edge to building a “sustained audience,” saying that nearly two-thirds of its users “prefer podcasts with video.” Spotify’s data indicates that video podcasts retain audiences 26% better than audio-only shows.

And there’s more to it than that. According to Video’s Rise in Podcasting, research conducted by Sounds Profitable and Signal Hill Insights, a third of video-first podcast consumers spend nine or more hours on those shows every week; among audio-first consumers, only 19 percent do.

So, TL;DR, video matters. And Spotify should be lauded for offering a free and easy competitor to YouTube for video podcasts. But on YouTube, creators have the option to upload both an audio and a video version of their podcasts, if they wish.

But, video isn’t for everyone

As Doug’s story shows, pivoting to video on Spotify comes with some trade-offs that may not be worth it for certain audio creators.

He estimates that producing his cold-open stories as videos could cost hundreds of dollars, per episode. Doing so might also mean writing the script to suit available video footage, at the expense of the freewheeling audio story.

“It would be great video, but I would question, is it more effective for the viewer than the piece that we create for the listener?” Doug says. “What the listener can create with their mind is more personal and exceptionally more dramatic and more meaningful.”

Even for more conventional interview shows, which don’t have highly produced narrative segments, the audio version of a podcast can be noticeably different from the video one.

In my own experience as a branded podcast editor for LightningPod, I’ve found that careful editing of disfluencies (ums, uhs, repeated words, etc.) can invisibly shave 5 to 10 minutes off an hour-long audio recording.

Those edits make hosts & guests alike sound better… and they save listeners hours of time in aggregate. To achieve the same times savings in video, you’d have to make something that looks choppy and less professional.

Video and advertising

Spotify’s podcast management platform, Spotify for Creators, is cleanly designed, easy to use, and accessible to podcasters who use other hosting services. Users who have replaced their audio files with videos can undo that by re-uploading the audio file to the same episode, the Spotify spokesperson said.

However, those who host their shows directly with Spotify or Megaphone get certain privileges that others do not. Replacing the audio file also removes dynamically inserted ad breaks, and only Spotify for Creators-hosted shows can insert ad breaks into the new video episode.

“We’ll reach out if we have any updates to share in the future about expanded access,” the spokesperson said.

This puts aspiring video podcasters who use audio creatively, or for whom fully embracing video would break the bank, in a tricky spot. Are more downloads worth it if you can’t run your ads on the biggest listening platform in town?

Until these impacts to both the listening experience and monetization are addressed, producers may want to weigh their options carefully. The spokesperson acknowledged that “video isn’t for everyone.”

“Podcasters should always go with the format that’s best for them and their show,” they said. “If a creator doesn’t feel their show benefits from video, we support audio content exactly as we always have, and creators can continue to monetize as they always have.”