Talking about podcasts and YouTube could sound, at first, contradictory. And it is that the concept we have of podcasts, I always wanted, is that they are audio recordings, a format that makes them a very practical choice for any time when we cannot focus our attention on a screen, such as when we are walking , when we are driving, when we have already gone to bed and want to fall asleep with the background sound of one of these recordings. In such contexts, YouTube’s video proposal does not fit.
And yet, the most popular video-on-demand service on the Internet is aware of the relevance that podcasts are gaining, and the large economic investments that are being made in said market. A market from which, obviously, it does not want to be left out, even if it does not completely coincide with its native format. Thus, as we can read in Bloomberg, YouTube would be making economic offers to creators of podcasts, so that they record them in video format and that, in this way, fit more with the proposal of the platform.
According to the sources cited in said article, YouTube’s economic offers to podcasters would range from $50,000 to individual authors, up to $300,000 for podcast networks. The proposal would include both video recording (and not just audio) of the podcast episodes, as well as the creation of other content recorded on video, also for YouTube.
Although not as common in other regions of the world, the recording of video podcasts does already have some experience in the United States, where it became especially popular among “outsider” political analysts, in a trend that quickly spread to other areas, both thematic and geographical, even giving rise to radio programs that already used the podcast format, will start recording their broadcasts on video and uploading them to YouTube and similar services.
It does not seem by chance, moreover, that this YouTube movement comes a few months after Spotify opened its platform to video podcasts, in a movement that, among others, pointed to YouTube. Undoubtedly, in Google’s offices, this novelty from Spotify set off alarms, given the risk that creators of this type of content could be tempted to make the leap from YouTube to Spotify, and it is surely that fear, along with the interest of compete more strongly in the podcast market, which has led the company to make these offers to content creators.
So, this seems like a pretty smart move on YouTube’s part, waiting for Spotify plansannounced last year and that began to take off in August, finish gaining speed once and for all, and not with big ads that lead to nothing, but with content, which is what its users expect.
