Podtrac just launched a new global podcast ranking–and, for the first time, it’s counting YouTube views as part of that data.
The new ranker–the Podcast Global Industry Ranking of Top Publishers and Networks–is meant to provide podcast performance metrics to “advertisers, agencies, and industry stakeholders,” Podtrac says.
As for why data from YouTube is vital to include, The Verge‘s podcast newsletter Hot Pod sat down with Podtrac founder/CEO Mark McCrery, who said that over the past year, his company has “seen more and more interest in understanding YouTube’s impact on podcasting.”
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“Publishers and networks told us that capturing their YouTube counts would provide a more complete picture of their podcast distribution footprint, which is helpful to advertisers and other industry partners,” he said.
And, he added, “we’ve seen, on an individual podcast basis, significant views from podcasts on YouTube.”
According to the first month’s worth of data from Podtrac’s new ranking, a lot of those YouTube views are being generated by corporate productions. The Verge reports that the podcast hosting platform Libsyn, which is pretty creator-forward and hosts a lot of indie podcasts, only sees 7% of its traffic come from YouTube, with the rest coming from platforms like Spotify.
Paramount, on the other hand, gets the majority of its podcast views from YouTube.
But there might be an upside for indie creators still: McCrery told The Verge that Podtrac thinks YouTube could be “effective for discovery,” because it’s noticed short clips of episodes tend to generate significant view counts. (Though, to avoid skewing results, Podtrac isn’t counting viewership of short clips in its new ranking, just viewership of full-length episodes.)
McCrery said Podtrac has also noticed “personality-driven, full-video podcasts tend to perform well on YouTube.” He advises that if YouTube wants to keep pushing its podcast ambitions–which it certainly does–it should focus more on video-first shows with content that could translate to audio-only, and on getting more of its YouTube Music subscribers to embrace adding podcasts to their libraries.
