Who Is Watching All These Podcasts?

New York Times

4 hours ago

The following are the runtimes of some recent episodes of several of YouTube's more popular podcasts:
'This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,' #595: Two hours, 14 minutes.
'Club Shay Shay,' #172: Two hours, 59 minutes.
'The Shawn Ryan Show,' #215: Five hours, four minutes.
'Lex Fridman Podcast,' #461: Five hours, 20 minutes.
These shows follow the same general format: people sitting in chairs, in generically designed studios, talking.
And, like many of the biggest podcasts these days, these shows are all released as videos.
They don't feature particularly fancy camerawork, or flashy graphics, or narratives. All of them require time commitments typical of feature films, ball games or marathon performance art installations. Yet going by YouTube's statistics, hundreds of thousands of people have viewed all of the above episodes.
Which leads to comments like this, as one fan wrote after a recent episode of Theo Von's show: 'Truly, this podcast was amazing to watch.'
So a genre of media named for an audio device — the iPod, discontinued by Apple in 2022 — and popularized by audiences enamored with on-demand listening has transformed in recent years into a visual one.
It's well established that the American brain is the prize in a war for attention online, a place that incentivizes brief and sensational content, not static five-hour discussions about artificial intelligence.
So what gives? Who exactly is watching the supersize video talk shows that have come to define podcasting over the last several years?
At the highest level, the audience for video podcasts is simply people who consume podcasts.
'Who is watching these?' said Eric Nuzum, a podcast strategist. 'A person who loves podcasts who happens to be near a screen.'
Indeed, according to an April survey by Cumulus Media and the media research firm Signal Hill Insights, nearly three-quarters of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimize them, compared with about a quarter who listen only to the audio. Paul Riismandel, the president of Signal Hill, said that this split holds across age groups — it's not simply driven by Gen Z and that younger generation's supposed great appetite for video.
But dive a bit deeper into the data, and it becomes clear that how people are watching podcasts — and what counts as watching — is a far more revealing question. According to the Signal Hill survey, about 30 percent of people who consume podcasts 'play the video in the background or minimize on their device while listening.' Perhaps this person is folding laundry and half-watching 'Pod Save America,' or has 'The Joe Rogan Experience' open in a browser tab while they do busy work at the office.
That describes Zoë McDermott, a 31-year-old title insurance producer from Pennsylvania, who said she streams video of Theo Von's show on her phone while she works.
'I don't have the ability to watch the entire thing through, but I do my glance downs if I hear something funny,' Ms. McDermott said. 'It's passive a little bit.'
Still, this leaves everyone else — more than half of YouTube podcast consumers, who say they are actively watching videos. Here, it gets even trickier. YouTube, the most popular platform for podcasts, defines 'views' in a variety of ways, among them a user who clicks 'play' on a video and watches for at least 30 seconds: far from five hours. And the April survey data did not distinguish between people who were watching, say, four hours of Lex Fridman interviewing Marc Andreessen from people who were viewing the much shorter clips of these podcasts that are ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram Reels, X and YouTube itself.
All of which makes it hard to pinpoint a 'typical' podcast viewer. Is it a couple on the couch with a bucket of popcorn, streaming to their smart TV? Is it a young office worker scrolling through TikTok during his commute? Or is it the same person engaging in different behavior at different points in the day?
Alyssa Keller, who lives in Michigan with her family, said sometimes she watches 'The Shawn Ryan Show' on the television with her husband. But more often, she puts the video on the phone for a few hours while her children are napping. This means she sometimes has to watch marathon episodes in chunks.
'I've been known to take multiple days,' she said. 'Nap times only last for like two hours.'
In February, YouTube announced that more than a billion people a month were viewing podcasts on its platform. According to Tim Katz, the head of sports and news partnerships at YouTube, that number is so large it must include users who are actually mainlining five-hour talk shows.
'Any time you have a number that large, you're going to have a broad swath of people consuming in lots of different ways,' Mr. Katz said.
Recently, The New York Times asked readers if and how they consume video podcasts. Many of the respondents said they played video podcasts in the background while attending to work or chores, and still treated podcasts as audio-only products. A few said they liked being able to see the body language of podcast hosts and their guests. Still others said that they didn't like video podcasts because they found the visual component distracting or unnecessary.
Video can have its drawbacks. Lauren Golds, a 37-year-old researcher based in Virginia, said that she regularly hate-watches podcasts at work — in particular 'On Purpose,' which is hosted by the British entrepreneur and life coach Jay Shetty. She said she'd had awkward encounters when co-workers have looked at her screen and told her that they love the show she's watching.
'There's no way to say it's garbage and I'm watching it for entertainment purposes to fill my need for hatred,' Ms. Golds said.
One thing a 'typical' podcaster consumer is less likely to be these days is someone listening to a full-attention-required narrative program. Say 'podcast' and many people still instinctively think of painstakingly produced, deeply reported, audio-only shows like 'Serial' and 'This American Life,' which listeners consumed via audio-only platforms like Apple Podcasts and the iHeartRadio app. Traditional podcasts relied on host-read and scripted ads to make money, and on media coverage and word of mouth for discovery. And it was a lot of money, in some cases: In 2019, to take one example, Spotify acquired Gimlet — one of the defining podcast producers of the 2010s — as part of a $340 million investment in podcast start-ups.
Now, the size of the market for video podcasts is too large to ignore, and many ad deals require podcasters to have a video component. The platforms where these video podcasts live, predominantly YouTube and Spotify, are creating new kinds of podcast consumers, who expect video.
Ms. McDermott, the Theo Von fan, said the video component made her feel like she had a friendly guest in her home.
'It feels a little more personal, like somebody is there with you,' she said. 'I live alone with my two cats and I'm kind of in a rural area in Pennsylvania, so it's just a little bit of company almost.'
The world of podcasts today is also far more integrated into social media. Clips of video podcasts slot neatly into the Gen Z and millennial behemoths of TikTok and Instagram. The sophisticated YouTube recommendation algorithm suggests relevant new podcasts to viewers, something that wasn't possible in the old, siloed model on other platforms. To get a sense of just how much things have changed, imagine the viral podcast appearances of the 2024 presidential campaign — Donald J. Trump on Theo Von's podcast and Kamala Harris on 'Call Her Daddy' — happening without YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X. You can't.
In a sign of the times, in June the radio company Audacy shuttered Pineapple Street Studios, a venerable podcast producer known for its in-depth narrative shows like 'Wind of Change' and Ronan Farrow's 'The Catch and Kill Podcast.'
Jenna Weiss-Berman, who co-founded Pineapple Street, is now the head of audio at the comedian and actress Amy Poehler's Paper Kite Productions. Ms. Poehler's new podcast, called 'Good Hang with Amy Poehler,' is typical of the genre: a charismatic, well-known host, interviewing other charismatic, well-known people.
Ms. Weiss-Berman said she was concerned that the costs associated with high-quality video production would be prohibitive for smaller podcast creators, who faced almost no barrier to entry when all the genre required was a few microphones.
'If you want to do it well, you need a crew and a studio,' Ms. Weiss-Berman said.
For podcasters with an established audience, the potential of video to open up new audiences for the world of talk podcasts is obvious. (The New York Times has introduced video podcasts hosted by some of its more recognizable columnists.)
Adam Friedland, a comedian who started his video interview show in 2022, first came to prominence on an irreverent and lewd audio-only hangout podcast with two fellow comedians. He got an early taste of the limitations of traditional podcast distribution when he discovered fan cut-ups of the funniest moments of his old show on YouTube.
'There was an organic growth to it,' Mr. Friedland said. 'We weren't doing press or promoting it.'
Mr. Friedland's new show is an arch interview program with high-profile guests and considerably fewer impenetrable — not to mention scatological — references. Along with that, distribution over YouTube has made a once cult figure something a bit closer to a household name, as he discovered recently.
'There was a regular middle-aged guy at a Starbucks who said he liked the show,' Mr. Friedland recalled. 'Some guy holding a Sweetgreen.'
Mr. Friedland's show is the rare video podcast with a distinctive visual point of view; the vintage-looking set is a reconstruction of 'The Dick Cavett Show.' And Mr. Friedland made it clear that he prefers people to watch the show rather than listen to it.
The many ways that Americans now consume podcasts — actively and passively, sometimes with another device in hand, sometimes without — bears an obvious similarity to the way Americans consume television.
'I think podcasts could become kind of the new basic cable television,' said Marshall Lewy, the chief content officer of Wondery, a podcast network owned by Amazon. Think: shows that are cheaper to produce than so-called premium streaming content, consumed by audiences used to half-watching television while scrolling their smartphones, in a wide variety of genres. Indeed, while talk dominates among video podcasts, Mr. Lewy said he thought the trend for video would lead to more shows about food and travel — categories beloved by advertisers — that weren't ideal when podcasts were audio only.
All of which calls into question the basic nature of the term 'podcast.' Mr. Riismandel, who runs the research firm Signal Hill, said he thought the category applied to any programming that could be listened to without video and still understood. According to Mr. Katz, the YouTube executive, the nature of the podcaster is undergoing a redefinition. It includes both audio-only podcasters moving to video, as well as social media content creators who have realized that podcasts present another opportunity to build their audiences.
One concern with the shift to video, according to the former Vox and Semafor video boss Joe Posner, is that people who are less comfortable onscreen will be left out. This could lead to a deepening gender divide, for example, since women are much more likely to face harassment over their looks, especially from an engaged online fan base — and therefore potentially less likely to want to be on camera for hours on end.
Still, for all the eyeballs moving to YouTube, audio remains the way most consumers experience podcasts, according to the April survey, with 58 percent of people listening to only audio or to a minimized or backgrounded video. And while YouTube is now the most used platform for podcast consumption, per the survey, it's far from monolithic; a majority of podcast consumers say they use a platform other than YouTube most often, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
That's why at least one pillar of audio-first podcasting doesn't see much to be alarmed about. Ira Glass, the creator of the foundational long-form radio show 'This American Life,' said that the fact that the podcast tent has gotten bigger and thrown up a projector screen doesn't threaten a program like his.
'That's a strength, not a weakness — that both things exist and are both called the same thing,' Mr. Glass said.
He stressed that audio-only podcasting has formal strengths that video podcasts don't.
'There's a power to not seeing people,' Mr. Glass continued. 'There's a power to just hearing things. It just gets to you in a different way. But if people want to watch people on a talk show that seems fine to me. I don't feel protective of podcasting in that way. I don't have snowflake-y feelings about podcasts.'