YouTube Reaches 1 Billion Monthly Podcast Viewers

YouTube has surpassed 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content, the video platform announced on Wednesday, cementing its position as the most frequently used podcast service in the United States. The Google-owned platform reported viewers watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices last year.

So what's the difference...

[MpVpRb]

...between a "podcast" and a regular youtube video?

Re:

[skam240]

I assume it's the visual element.

I know I personally don't like normal podcasts for the same reasons I dont like talking on the phone. I don't like not being able to see visual cues from the speaker and I don't like voices talking in my ear I cant see.

Not that there is anything wrong with traditional podcasts if that's something you like.

Re:

[eneville]

I prefer the audio, it allows me to put something on that's interesting and just listen whilst doing something else.

The video part of it takes too much focus. Podcasts are a bit like audiobooks. A nice story whilst doing something else.

Re:

[skam240]

Oh shit, that's not what you were asking. My bad.

Re:

[paxmees]

You can download a podcast and play it on your iPod.

Re:

[toxonix]

Or your Zune. Don't forget the Zune.
do these things still exist in the wild?

Re:

[eneville]

Some still survive

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.h... [ebay.co.uk]

Re:

[TurboStar]

There's three types of videos on YouTube:
1. shorts.
2. regular content (5-30 mins). RIP
3. stupidly-long content (> 1 hour) designed to abuse the algorithm because of auto-play.

Hence the rise of "supercuts" and "podcasts" in your feed. I suspect more than 50% of view time on stupid-long content is folks who went AFK or minimized a muted tab on auto-play. It's not an easy problem to fix and there's no incentive to do so since a 3 hour waste-of-time serves up a shitload of ads.

Re:

[DesScorp]

...between a "podcast" and a regular youtube video?

"Regular" YouTube videos can be anything from old clips of concerts to some random guy posting footage of his kids. Podcasts, in YouTube's category, are organized discussions or monologs by a host/hosts in a series in video format. Joe Rogan is the model here, and the gamut of podcasts runs from politics to culture to science and education. Lots of podcasters emphasize the visual as much as the spoken content, with graphs, clips, stats, etc. There are certain podcasts I get from Apple for audio-only, and I'

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

I can't even get YouTube on my iPod, how are y'all listening to podcasts?

1 Billion

[PPH]

Or so they claim. Are they counting those nuisance pop-up videos that they splat in the middle of the content I'm trying to read?

Not so fast

[Tablizer]

They can't claim that, nobody actually knows [slashdot.org] and/or have no way to verify Google's claims.

Re:

[alvinrod]

You could possibly argue that Google can't distinguish humans from bots so not every view is from an actual person consuming the content, but Google will know the number of times something is viewed. They could fudge numbers a bit by counting anything over 10 seconds as a view even if it's a two hour podcast episode, or even by stretching the definition of what they count as a podcast. However, internally they have exact data about the views. Not all of it will be reported to the public of course, but withi

Not surprising...

[w1z7ard]

Since they decommissioned Google Podcast, the existing traffic either found other services or were basically forced onto youtube. https://www.theverge.com/23891... [theverge.com]

Terrible summary / article

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't watch a podcast. You listen to a podcast.

Is that even what they mean? Youtube is a visual medium, it makes little sense to listen to podcasts with some static background image. I mean you could, many songs do it. But they're short. A regular podcast? Seems inefficient to the point of lunacy.

Or do they mean watching a video cast of people recording a pod? That seems more likely, but that's definitely not a podcast. Podcast by definition means audio only.

Words mean things. Yes lang

How can YouTube keep up with the storage?

[JackAxe]

And still be profitable? I read that about every second an hour of video is uploaded and much of the newer content is 4k@60fps.

YouTube is my primary source of entertainment. Hopefully they never run out of space. :)

Re:

[toxonix]

Compression codecs, inexpensive storage. Data storage costs for all of google are probably less than their top executive compensations combined. They have exabytes of random access live storage and probably a lot more than that on automated tape backup in linear access.

Re:

[eneville]

Probably quadrupled though in front end cache for popular content too. Globally resilient, probably mirrored in each location.

Re:

[JackAxe]

I didn't even think about the tape for storage. I'm still baffled at this, as the scale goes so far beyond my limited scope. I imagine people swapping in and out storage 24/7. :)

Check my maths, but...

[Vegan Cyclist]

Unless I'm off, if there's 1 billion podcast 'viewers', and each listened to 1hr of podcasts, would that not be 1 billion hours of play time in a month?

But they list 400 million hours in a month.

So on average each viewer listened to less than 30mins of a podcast each month.

Is that right? If so, doesn't really seem quite that impressive.. Big reach, sure, but most aren't actually listening at all by the looks if it.