Nearly every study about podcasts shows listeners discover podcasts more frequently on YouTube, and many podcast consumers are just as interested in watching as they are in listening. ESPN has started providing more of its podcast episodes on YouTube, and says it is only helping.
During an interview with Nieman Lab, ESPN’s Vice President of Digital Production Mike Foss said that even after the network has grown its podcast presence on YouTube, it hasn’t seen a dropoff in its audio metrics.
“We’re seeing this is not cannibalistic to audio,” Foss said. “No one’s audio numbers have dropped as a result of them being available on YouTube. It’s maintained and grown so I think everybody recognizes the opportunity to grow their footprint.”
Foss added podcasts also did well with the YouTube Shorts feature the platform introduced as a competitor to TikTok in 2021.
“What we saw pretty quickly was that podcasts — 30 minutes, 40 minutes, even hour-long shows — had high retention rates,” Foss said. “The result has been a really healthy, happy ecosystem where we have short-form clips that are driving scale with YouTube Shorts. And we have longer-form content, including podcasts, that are driving retention and total time spent.
“I don’t think we could have predicted that it would work so linearly,” Foss concluded. “But we’re happy that it did.”
In total, ESPN now provides 28 different podcasts on YouTube in addition to its traditional audio-only versions.
