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Souvik Banerjee

Exclusive: YouTube's plans for podcasting

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Sep 12 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
  • Exclusive: YouTube is planning tighter integration, monetisation and analytics for podcasts

Despite no announcement from YouTube’s director of podcasting, Kai Chuk, at Podcast Movement Evolutions last week, Podnews has been sent an 84-page presentation produced by YouTube, intended for podcast publishers. In it, three slides marked “Looking Ahead” allow us a view into what YouTube is planning…

YouTube mockup

YouTube is looking at ingesting podcast RSS feeds directly, the slides suggest, with a new podcasts homepage to be at youtube.com/podcasts (a URL that doesn’t work, yet). Podcasts appear to be promoted with familiar, square, artwork thumbnails.

YouTube monetisation

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YouTube is to feature audio ads: both sold by Google but also by partners too, if they’re large enough. YouTube’s standard practice has been to share revenue with publishers, so we might expect, perhaps, revenue to be shared for podcast publishers as well.

YouTube attribution

YouTube will also supply analytics, particularly “new metrics for audio-first creators”. We might expect something aligning with the IAB guidelines, perhaps. And the company appears to be working with podcast attribution, like that available from Nielsen, Podtrac, and Chartable. Chartable was bought by Spotify in February, so perhaps this slide shows companies that YouTube have worked with, rather than companies it might work with in future.

We’ve contacted YouTube for comment.

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Companies mentioned above:
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