YouTube vs. Audio Podcasts

"Audio Podcasts" = Traditional RSS Distribution

NOTE FROM DAVID: This is from my friend, Shrikant Joshi, a seasoned veteran of the Indian radio industry and independent audio creator from Pune, India.

Want more from Shrikant? Follow him on LinkedIn.

---

YouTube is for reach.

RSS/Audio is for loyalty.

And this will hold true until someone develops a radical new distribution mechanism for RSS/Audio.

The biggest advantage YouTube offers right now is that it can bring your episode immediately to your network, because almost everyone has a Google account. Right off the bat, you’re looking at a thousand-odd impressions for just your first episode, without you having to move a finger.

RSS/Audio on the other hands, requires you to push the episode to a thousand-odd contacts yourself, if you want those thousand-odd impressions.

In either case, it’s the content of your podcast that determines whether it will gather a following.

But, here's the thing: the odds of an RSS/Audio podcast gathering loyalty are far higher than YouTube podcasts gathering loyalty—simply because of the nature of the medium itself. YouTube is for short attention span. RSS/Audio can achieve longer attention spans, but at the cost of passive listening.

The other thing to keep in mind is that producing video is more expensive compared to audio alone—both in terms of time and money. Even accounting for the glut of AI-powered editing tools (video or audio), the existing market for podcasts has gotten worse since so many are same cookie-cutter versions built with the same kinds of templates.