Busting the myth of YouTube search for podcast growth
Busting the myth of YouTube search for podcast growth
Search is transactional; podcasts are relational.
Well hello!
A hearty welcome to all of you who have recently subscribed to this email via the Podcast Crew waitlist.
For the rest: in case you’ve missed my incessant and probably quite annoying LinkedIn posts this week, I’m canvassing opinion on a business idea in development.
The vision is to create a quick, simple one-stop solution for podcast recruitment - enabling clients to spin up production teams quickly with vetted, verified world-class producers and podcast professionals.
It’s called Podcast Crew.
I’m currently testing the idea by opening a wait list. If we get enough interest to prove there is a market for it, we’ll start building.
If this sounds like a service you could use, please sign up at www.podcastcrew.co.uk to be notified as soon as we launch and get first access to our talent pool.
And for all the podcast professionals out there - sign up to the talent waitlist to register your interest in joining the crew.
The wait list is open until Wednesday 13th November, so if you’re reading this on Monday you have just three days left to register your interest.
Now, on with this issue of Podcast Strategy Weekly.
The myth of YouTube search for podcast growth
If you’ve ever sought advice on how to grow a YouTube channel you’ve likely heard this stat:
“YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.”
This is normally followed up with a how-to guide which advises channels how to grow on YouTube by optimising for search.
Entire SaaS businesses have been built on the premise that optimising for search is the best way to grow your channel.
VidIQ, TubeBuddy and more include a core offering which identifies high-potential search terms (high volume search vs low volume results - or high demand, low supply).
These can be extremely useful, and I’ll go into more detail about ways to use this information in a future email. But many YouTube educators seem to suggest search is the best - or only - strategy to grow your channel.
For podcasts, this is misleading.
I’ve grown two very different YouTube channels to modest success reaching over 100,000 subscribers. In my experience there is a better, and far preferable strategy for growing podcasts on YouTube.
What YouTube search is good for
YouTube search can be a powerful growth tool for particular content types.
Content that works well in search tends to meet users at their point of need, in answer to a particular query.
This means educational content such as how-to guides, or advice like product reviews work well.
Think about the last time you searched for something on YouTube. Chances are it was to find out how to do or understand something.
This summer I started riding a motorbike. For several months my YouTube search activity was variations on “how to prepare for motorbike training”, “how to do X on a motorbike” and “motorbike reviews”. You’ve probably searched YouTube for similar content around your own interests (or searched Google and been presented with YouTube videos).
News-related content also performs well in search, for the same reason: people search for the stories they want to see video of.
At the Evening Standard we built an audience on YouTube and the vast majority of video views came through search. Our strategy for that channel involved publishing news clips related to breaking stories and trending topics. Success generally depended on publishing as fast as possible to get the first-mover advantage and exploit a small window of high search demand vs low competition.
You’ll see other news publishers employing a similar approach, and the Telegraph, the Sun, the Times and the Guardian have all driven YouTube growth with this method.
The downside of this approach is that while it can deliver big spikes of audience attention around certain stories, it is not in itself good at creating audience loyalty. The viewer searching for video from the Spanish floods is unlikely to care overmuch about the channel it comes from: they just want the must-see news clip.
For the Evening Standard channel large spikes did drive subscriber growth, but didn’t create raving fans. Most viewers to most videos were new each time, rather than returning viewers who came specifically to the Standard.
Educational videos can suffer a similar fate: searching for instructions on how to fix a leaky tap doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to subscribe and come back for tips on bleeding your radiators. At least, not until you need to.
The best educational creators do a fantastic job of injecting personality into their videos and providing real value so that audiences choose to come to them again, which is where we start to see more crossover with podcasts.
Where the best podcast traffic comes from
Podcasts are by-and-large personality driven. One of the great attractions of listening to podcasts is the pseudo-relationship you develop with the host or hosts. Many listeners choose to continue listening repeatedly because they feel warm towards the host, enjoy the returning format or both.
This is actually prime YouTube fodder - but if you focus purely on search for audience acquisition, you’ll miss the mark.
Search-driven growth is transactional: you need this thing, I will give it to you in exchange for your time.
Podcasts are more relational: join me and my friends, be part of the gang as we discuss/learn/enjoy something together.
Generally podcasts are less ‘how-to’ and more ‘come with’.
For this, you need to be targeting YouTube recommendations.
Remember, YouTube’s algorithm finds videos for every viewer who loads the YouTube app or website. In order to do this, it identifies the profile of the user and the types of videos they have watched in the past, compares with other users displaying a similar profile, and suggests the first user videos other similar users have also enjoyed.
When I joined the New Statesman I attempted to apply a search-driven strategy to our YouTube channel. Long story short, it didn’t work.
As a small channel with zero search authority we were unable to compete in search results for big news and politics stories.
We identified and isolated key search terms that we suspected we could realistically target, and that gave us a little more exposure in low-competition search results.
But when we started targeting recommendations, our audience growth started to accelerate.
Now, 78% of New Statesman YouTube podcast viewers come via YouTube recommendations - what displays in your YouTube analytics as “Browse Features” or “suggested videos”. This means users are seeing our videos displayed on their YouTube home feed, at the end of other videos, or in the sidebar which appears alongside other videos.
What’s more, over 60% of our views come from returning viewers. People are encountering our videos and then coming back for more.
YouTube search accounts for just 3% of total traffic.
In a future email I will explain exactly how to get YouTube to suggest your videos to other users, so subscribe to Podcast Strategy Weekly so you don’t miss it.
For now, I refer you to an earlier issue which explained how we used one weird trick to get YouTube to start recommending our content to our target audience - read that one here.
Actions you can take right now
Review your YouTube analytics: where does the majority of your traffic come from? Search, or recommendations?
Employ the tactics explained in this issue of Podcast Strategy Weekly to start targeting a specific user type.
Worth your time
Esquire have published a deeply reported feature on podcast production company Goalhanger, the powerhouse behind some of the biggest podcasts in the UK: The Rest Is… stable.
There’s loads of fascinating and useful insight in the piece, so I recommend reading the whole thing. In particular I love how they describe the way podcasts and their hosts become “a fixture in peoples lives”:
Over the course of the [Euros], The Rest is Football accumulated 19.6 million downloads and over 66 million views across social-media platforms, doubling its audience in the process.
In real terms, that means becoming a fixture of people’s lives — infiltrating their commutes, dog walks, bubble baths and everyday conversations — in the way that only podcasts can.
“I’ve just been to lunch now where a couple of middle-aged women came up to me and said: ‘I want to thank you for The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics’,” Lineker tells me, sounding slightly bewildered. The former England (and Tottenham, Everton and Barcelona) striker has been famous — properly stopped-in-the-street, sign-my-forehead famous — for 40 years, but even he finds this new chapter surreal.
Thanks so much for reading. If you found this useful, or have any feedback, questions or thoughts you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you. Reach me by reply to this email, or in the comments on Substack.
And remember, if you would find a bespoke podcast recruitment service helpful to your business, please join the wait list at podcastcrew.co.uk by Wednesday 13th November.
Until next time,
Chris