Grow Your Podcast Audience Through YouTube

YouTube is the fastest-growing podcast listening platform! Google is the largest search engine in the world, with over 86% of search market share. Since Google owns YouTube, it’s no surprise that YouTube content ranks among the top of all search engine results.

So how does this benefit podcasters?

When you hear about a podcast, most people will first search for it on Google, the simplest way to find virtually anything. If your podcast content is on YouTube, it will be found and likely show up on the first page of search results. This symbiotic association has made YouTube the fastest-growing podcast listening platform in the world. That’s why it is not surprising when a University of Florida and Futuri Media study revealed that 70% of all podcast consumption occurs on YouTube. Spotify and Apple are a distant second and third respectively.

Tom Webster of Edison Research states “Your podcast needs to be on YouTube…because it is the universal content search engine. YouTube itself is the second largest search engine behind Google and the number one content search engine. YouTube is now a universal platform .. if your podcast is there.That’s part of being easy to find”.

Podcast creators can not only get discovered through YouTube, but they can now also profit and learn from it while attracting new downloads and listeners.

YouTube SEO Impacts Google Rankings Just as you would optimize a website for search engine rankings, your podcast needs to be optimized as well for it to be ranked on Google. Fortunately, YouTube makes it easy to add the right keywords, tags, descriptions and titles without any SEO or programming experience, so your content can easily be found by those searching for this subject matter.

But that’s not all.

By allowing podcast “viewers” to rate and comment on the videos they watch, podcasters can get immediate, real-time feedback to their content. This offers a great opportunity to engage with your audience, gather valuable feedback, and respond to their questions.

According to a 2021 study, more than 1-in-4 monthly podcast listeners (27%) named YouTube as the platform they use most often. As a podcaster, you can choose to ignore that reality or embrace it. This creates a unique opportunity for podcasters not only to get comfortable with the YouTube platform, but also to profit from it, as YouTube’s footprint on podcast consumption is only going to grow from this point onward.

Bottom line: Choosing whether or not to participate in the world’s largest content search and recommendation engine is no longer a “nice-to-have”, but a “must-have” requirement for serious podcasters.

How To Profit from YouTube and Stand Out from the Pack: The majority of current podcasts on YouTube consist of videos that offer only a static thumbnail image with audio behind it. While, yes, it does replicate the podcast form, creators are missing out on a huge opportunity to evolve their creation into something that can also leverage YouTube’s video capabilities and its ability to connect with podcast listeners on an entirely new level. Until recently, there was no simple way for podcasters to take advantage of YouTube’s visual platform. The required time and video editing skills required to incorporate visual elements into their existing podcast was impractical for most podcasters.

While a number of tools allow you to add visual elements to audio content, Adori’s YouTube Publisher is specifically designed to allow podcast developers to add visual and graphic enhancements to their work and automatically upload that enhanced podcast directly to YouTube.

Simplifying the Process: Adori’s YouTube Publisher is a simple and intuitive tool with many powerful functions. It also leverages several little-known YouTube features most podcasters may not even know about. These “Adorified” elements create the potential for stronger engagement, longer engagement and increased monetization on YouTube.

But what makes the Adori’s YouTube Publisher truly unique is not just what it does, but how it does it — guiding the podcaster step-by-step through the entire graphic and visual integration process.

Here’s how simple it is:

After discovering and adding your podcast, the Adori platform can automatically create a transcript of your episode. Based on keywords extracted from that copy, Adori offers suggestions for graphics and visual images, offering you a wide variety of recommendations from several libraries of stock and royalty-free images. (You can also easily upload your own visual elements as well.) Then, you simply drag and drop those selected images onto an audio timeline, which also sets the length of time that image appears on-screen.

What’s particularly exciting is Adori’s ability to integrate with YouTube’s little-known chapter marker feature. For every image you upload, you can create a “tag” or chapter marker which shows up on the bottom of the screen as the video is playing.

Once you click on that tag, it automatically opens a screen, right next to the video, showing all of the chapter markers and what you can find or do at that point in the podcast. These descriptions can include content descriptions, plus opportunities to buy or to learn more about the subject.

YouTube Web experience with chapter markers and call to actions

YouTube App experience with chapter markers and call to actions on bottom of the screen.

Adori also populates the description information below the video with direct links to the content, information or purchase opportunity being discussed, further opening up attribution and monetization opportunities for creators. All through Adori’s simple and seamless integration tool.

Whether you are adding visual elements to your full podcast, augmenting certain clips or creating a short teaser video, audience engagement is immediately amplified by adding these interactive features to your YouTube podcast video.

Summary With the exponential growth of podcasting in general, any competitive edge which allows new audiences to find and engage with your efforts should be fully leveraged.

Whether you are using a tool like Adori’s YouTube Publisher or adding visual reinforcement on your own, getting your enhanced podcast on to the YouTube platform presents a huge opportunity for creators to expand their distribution and open up new monetization opportunities.