When people think about podcasting competition, they tend to focus on Spotify versus Apple – audio services. Yet YouTube is already a big, almost-accidental player in podcasting, with many shows uploaded to its platform even if they haven’t been filmed. Now YouTube is hoping to encourage more of them to produce video as well as audio versions.
Bloomberg reported that YouTube is “extending offers of $50,000 to individual shows and $200,000 and $300,000 to podcast networks” to turn audio podcasts into videos for its platform. YouTube played a significant role in the growth of Joe Rogan’s podcast in its pre-Spotify days, and although he only uses his YouTube channel for highlight clips now, it still has more than 12 million subscribers.
YouTube will be hoping to nurture a new generation of video podcast hits – ideally (from its point of view) ones that won’t up sticks if other platforms wave a big cheque at them.
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