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YouTube is touting a mind-boggling statistic to demonstrate its increasing dominance in podcasting.
In a release shared with Semafor, YouTube said it has hit 1 billion monthly active podcast consumers on its platform every month.
“This trend just really emerged organically,” Tim Katz, YouTube’s VP for news partnerships, told Semafor in an interview, citing the COVID-19 pandemic and the “growth of the living room” as crucial factors. “We’ve just been able to see this really powerful growth on the platform, and it’s not shown any signs of slowing down,” he said.
While YouTube has sometimes found itself at the center of negative stories about unrestricted (at times misleading or zany) speech on its platforms, in the months since the election, the company has embraced its image as the dominant podcast platform, ahead even of audio-first competitors like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. YouTube announced that viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices — that is, televisions, rather than phones — last year. And while it declined to say what the number was last year, Katz said the number was moving “quickly up and to the right.”
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It is not exactly clear how YouTube calculates a “podcast consumer.” But what started as organic growth is now a deliberate strategy by YouTube to scale up its podcast business.
Katz chalked up some of the growth to changes that YouTube made over the last several years to juice podcasting on the platform. He said the company worked to improve podcast discoverability via recommendations, a problem that its competitors have struggled with. While many creators continue to grumble about not getting a large enough piece of YouTube’s advertising pie, Katz also said that YouTube’s easy monetization has encouraged podcasters to grow their audiences on the platform. YouTube also touted its growth with public figures, like LeBron James and the Kelce brothers, who share their content on the platform.
YouTube has also continued to boom as a news platform, particularly among liberal commentators outraged by President Donald Trump.
Asked who the big news personalities are that people may not already be paying attention to, Katz singled out MeidasTouch. The anti-Trump media company has seen its YouTube viewership numbers skyrocket in recent months, helping push its show temporarily to the top of some podcast charts that include YouTube viewership numbers.
The company said while it has been successful growing podcasts on YouTube, it wants to spend the next year turning many of its successful video creators into podcasters.
“Growing the pie of the overall podcasting ecosystem is something that we’re really interested in, and we think that’s a great way to do it,” Katz said.