Netflix has its own YouTube channel. In fact, it has many YouTube channels, but if we just look at its main English-language channel, it has 32 million subscribers and drives around ~150 million views per month by posting trailers, behind-the-scenes clips, and sneak peeks at its paywalled programming.
Its goal? Simple: To convert YouTube viewers into Netflix subscribers.
But the podcasters Netflix is scooping up for exclusive deals aren’t allowed to follow this playbook.
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According to Ashley Carman’s latest Soundbite newsletter on Bloomberg, Netflix’s recent exclusive podcast deals with Barstool Sports and The Ringer contain a clause that limits the number of show clips creators can post on YouTube and other outside platforms.
Clipping, as you probably know, has become a major driver of creator growth. When I ran our Streamers on the Rise column, nearly every streamer I spoke to said that posting bite-size snippets of their streams on TikTok or YouTube Shorts led directly to growth in their Twitch audience. That’s true for long-form creators across all mediums–including podcasts.
People familiar with the Netflix deals didn’t tell Carman how many clips podcasters are limited to posting, but she said most folks she interviewed “seemed relatively unperturbed” by the clause.
“The reality is that most podcasters don’t have the manpower to publish tons of clips from each episode,” she said.
Clipping, though, is becoming a big enough business that there are professional, for-hire clippers the same way there are professional, for-hire YouTube editors. MrBeast even launched Vyro, a marketplace that pays viewers to clip creators’ content for them. This increasing importance and business-side development means these days, podcasters can have the manpower–either by hiring in-house or by tapping their viewer network–to generate more clips and bring in more viewers.
But the ones who’ve signed with Netflix can’t explore that.
Are we surprised that Netflix is constraining its podcast partners this way? Yes and no.
- No, because Netflix has a long and somewhat bitter history with YouTube, and sees the platform as its top competitor.
- Yes, because obviously Netflix is employing the YouTube clip method for its own content–and that seems to be paying off, since Netflix is, you know, still doing it.
Carman dug into the YouTube numbers for Netflix-signed shows like Spittin’ Chiclets and 3 & Out With John Middlekauff, and found they’ve experienced a significant dropoff in new subscribers since moving all of their new full-length episodes to Netflix. That’s to be expected; why would new people subscribe if there’s no new content?
She did find that 3 & Out With John Middlekauff, which got just 200 new YouTube subscribers in February, posted a three-minute clip urging people to find full-length episodes on Netflix, and responses from viewers weren’t overwhelmingly positive.
“I’d be watching this entire video right now but don’t feel like going to Netflix,” one commenter said. Another chimed, “Nobody uses Netflix for this type of content.”
That’s not true, at least according to Netflix. What we’d like to see here are some hard numbers about podcast performance, and how creators’ earnings compare on Netflix versus YouTube. We wouldn’t mind seeing the conversion rate from YouTube clips to Netflix viewers, either.
These are all probably pie-in-the-sky asks, and certainly data that Netflix will never release, making it difficult to tell whether podcasters are truly getting a good deal by giving up YouTube traffic.
