YouTube vs. Podcasting
At the end of last year,
of The Jordan Harbinger Show made this prediction about what would happen this year …“Podcasts have more engaged listeners, higher HHI, and are much harder to grow. YouTube starts to ‘make up the difference’ in pure volume, though. Also, creators become slaves to the YouTube algorithm and create for that, ruining their audio podcasts.”
HHI is the Herfindahl–Hirschman index, a measure of market concentration. A higher number indicates a more concentrated market. Here, it means a large percentage of the total podcast audience is concentrated within an unequally lower number of podcasts, similar to the 80/20 principle—80% of what’s consumed in podcasting comes from 20% of the podcasters.
Does it apply to podcasting? Probably. But most podcasts aren’t made for a general audience and are unaffected by this, so it’s not something most podcasters should worry about and probably isn’t something you need to worry about.
But what he said about the YouTube algorithm and podcasters creating for that … that’s unfortunately all too common.
YouTube is a great resource, but it’s not a great podcasting platform. It kills the audio-first advantages of podcasting, the big ones being passive consumption and portability.
Don’t neglect your existing audience to chase a few crumbs from YouTube’s algorithm. If you want to use YouTube as a discovery platform, I suggest focusing on short, video-first clips to drive people to your audio-first content, rather than modifying audio-first content to be a YouTube video—audio and video are two different animals.
