Spotify and YouTube Are Not Great for Podcasting

In my latest episode, “Spotify and YouTube Are Not Great for Podcasting,” what I really mean is that they’re not necessarily great for podcasters.

From a technology, distribution, and audience-building perspective, both platforms are incredibly valuable. They’re two enormous vehicles for getting podcasts into the ears—and increasingly the eyeballs—of an audience.

That part is great.

The problem is that Spotify and YouTube aren’t really in the podcasting business. They’re in the advertising business. And in order to sustain those businesses, they have to continue building walled gardens, controlling distribution, and finding new ways to extract more value from the content flowing through their platforms.

Spotify, skippable ads, and the walled garden

On the Spotify side, I talk about some recent reporting from James Cridland at Podnews around Spotify allowing users to skip certain inserted podcast ads.

Now Spotify is also selling advertising that cannot be skipped.

On the surface, the whole thing feels strange. Spotify can determine which ads you can skip, which ads you can't skip, and how advertising behaves around a podcast that the company itself may not have created or produced.

According to James, Spotify is able to do this because of the terms and agreements users accept when using the platform.

And that's exactly the larger issue.

Once podcast consumption moves inside these giant platforms, the rules of podcasting start becoming the rules of the platform instead.

YouTube has a different kind of power

When James originally talked about Spotify skipping podcast ads, plenty of people pointed out that YouTube Premium already removes advertising for paying subscribers.

There is an important difference: YouTube still shares a portion of Premium revenue with creators.

But we're also seeing YouTube continue to tighten its grip on monetization and how revenue gets distributed to creators.

There's another part of YouTube's ecosystem that I don't think gets discussed enough in podcasting: you can simply pay YouTube to promote your own videos.

A podcaster can upload an episode and then use YouTube's built-in promotion tools to stimulate views and potentially grow subscriber counts.

That's dramatically different from traditional podcasting.

You can't go into Overcast or Pocket Casts, hand them some money, and suddenly guarantee yourself a massive influx of plays and followers.

Sure, podcast apps can feature shows. Podcasters can purchase advertising. There have always been ways to promote a podcast.

But the sheer scale of YouTube—and the fact that the promotion mechanism exists inside the same platform where your public numbers are measured—creates a very different dynamic.

Suddenly, views and subscriber counts can be accelerated with money.

And those same numbers can later become part of the pitch used to sell advertising and sponsorships.

That's not what makes podcasting great

This is ultimately why I say Spotify and YouTube aren't great for podcasting.

It's not because podcasters shouldn't use them. I absolutely think you should distribute your show wherever your audience wants to consume it.

It's because these platforms have fundamentally different incentives.

They can manipulate how audiences are reached. They can change how advertising works. They can squeeze monetization. They can introduce pay-to-promote mechanisms that dramatically affect the numbers everyone uses to judge success.

I'm also not pretending there's some simple thing Spotify or YouTube could change that would suddenly fix everything.

The media landscape is massive, competitive, and expensive. If you're operating at the scale of Spotify or YouTube, you're probably going to make aggressive decisions in order to generate aggressive amounts of revenue.

Podcasting has traditionally worked differently.

Building an audience is hard.

Building relationships is hard.

Selling sponsorships is hard.

And strangely enough, that's part of what makes podcasting so valuable.

There isn't always an algorithm waiting to hand you an audience. There isn't always a button you can press to manufacture another 100,000 views.

You have to make something worthwhile, earn people's attention, and build relationships over time.

That's what makes podcasting great—and incredibly challenging—all at the same time.

Watch or listen to today's episode, “Spotify and YouTube Are Not Great for Podcasting,” now on Spotify and YouTube.