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This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach. And today I am here to say that not every podcast episode belongs on YouTube. Now, I've been growing podcasts on YouTube for over a year now. I've seen a client who was stuck at a hundred views per episode get to 10,000 views. Just last week, a client got over 15,000 views on episode two of a podcast that we relaunched together. And another one of my clients went from nine YouTube subscribers to 233,000 YouTube subscribers in one year. So I've seen some stuff that works. But I've also seen many podcasters really struggle with YouTube, including, and sometimes especially me, because while I was successfully helping others get really big results with their video shows, I couldn't seem to crack the code for this show on YouTube. Now, when grow the show originally started, and you might remember this if you are a Grow the show og, it was an audio only interview show that was like super narrative. I had like voiceovers and music underneath and stuff. But pretty quickly it transitioned into mostly solo episodes because those episodes worked better for my business. They had better retention, they were easier to make, they had better engagement, and they had way better conversions. So far and away, solo episodes were king. But then last year I moved to YouTube and for a while I couldn't figure out why some solo episodes would do great on YouTube while others didn't. Because some solo episodes that I thought would crush on YouTube would get like, you know, a couple hundred views, whereas others that I really didn't think would do that well would get over a thousand views. There wasn't a pattern that I could find and it was driving me crazy because that is what I do. I find patterns in podcast growth in, and I share them with you. So what made things even more confusing is that guest episodes were really starting to do well on YouTube, which to me was a surprise because for years I've been telling people, don't consider guest interviews as a growth Strategy. But then YouTube came along, and for a lot of YouTube channels, it's guest interviews that are driving growth. I talked a little bit about this a couple weeks ago, but all in all, suffice it to say, I was like, okay, YouTube is completely making me rethink everything that I know about how to grow a podcast. And so I figured the guest thing out. I'm like, okay, I understand why guest interviews work well on YouTube because they drive high watch times. People will put an interview on, they'll Leave it on for an hour. And YouTube loves that because YouTube wants people to stay and keep watching ads. But the solo thing, I just couldn't crack. I'm like, why is it. What is the pattern here? Why is it that some solo episodes crush on audio, don't crush on video, crush on video, don't crush on audio. What's the difference? And I couldn't figure it out until I decided to become a YouTube watcher. So for a long time, I was never an extreme YouTube consumer. I wasn't somebody that spends tons and tons of time consuming YouTube. There may be two channels that I watched here and there, and I would, like, maybe, you know, look up a music video or something. But once I committed to growing podcasts on YouTube, I knew that I had to understand the platform as a viewer, not just as a creator. So I started watching. And one night I clicked on an explainer video about what was happening in the Middle East. And it promised to break down the whole situation in like, 30 minutes. And I was like, okay, cool. That would be. I would like to know. I would like to understand this a little bit better. And as soon as I turned it on, I was like, oh, okay, I get it. I was floored. Not by the information, because the information, you know, I could have gotten from a dozen news articles, but what blew me away about this video was how good it was at keeping me watching. Every single second of the video was engineered to keep my visual attention. The visuals, the pacing, the scripting, every word and every pixel on the screen had been thought through. And that video had 5 million views in two weeks. And yes, it was a topic that people are super interested in, but if you saw this video, you'd be like, oh, my goodness, this is crazy. And that is what I got it. Because that is what we solo podcasters are up against. And that is why the solo podcasts that do well on audio don't do so well on video. So why is it? Well, when someone watches content like that, like that 40 minute, perfectly produced, every moment is designed to hold you type of video, it resets in their brain what watchable feels like. It's just like what Amazon prime did to shipping. Remember back when four to six weeks of shipping was normal? You'd be like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And you'd order something and you'd expect to wait weeks for it to arrive. Now three days pisses you off. So Amazon didn't make us happier about shipping. We're not all walking around in bliss because things get to us in two days, it just made three days feel unbearable. That's what's happened with YouTube. The retention standard is extremely high. People are watching really expensive, really heavily produced videos that is designed to keep them watching. Podcasters are just used to talking for 20 minutes, publishing. And if you listen to what we talk about here and your shows growing, getting rave reviews, why is this? Well, it's because listening to someone for 20 minutes is great. Watching them talk for 20 minutes sucks. And that is when it clicked for me. I finally understood why some of my episodes did well on YouTube while other solo episodes flopped. The solo episodes that did well on YouTube had a visual component. So I was drawing something, or I might have been sharing or walking through a document or outline, or I might have slides or there was a template that I was showing. Now, what's funny is these episodes didn't do so well on audio because I was referring to things that you, the listener, couldn't see. But the solo episodes where I just turned on the camera and riffed and my editing team would like, you know, edit it down and maybe add some flair, just never did super well on YouTube. It just didn't. But with the audio versions of those episodes, people would literally write in emails to say how good it was and they'd like, you know, apply and join my program because of the audio episode. So it's with this that I realized that there's actually three types of podcast episodes right now, and they perform differently on audio and video. Let's start with discuss. So discuss is great for video and great for audio, and this is why podcasts are doing so well on YouTube right now. It's two or more people talking. It's interviews, it's co host conversations, it's talking to your clients, your customers, your team. This is the format that works everywhere. YouTube, Spotify, audio only, everywhere. And it works because it's easy and enjoyable to consume both passively and actively. You can watch two people having a conversation. You can also listen to it while you're driving and you can put it on in the background. And the algorithms all love it because people stay consuming that content for a really long time. So discuss is great because it works in both forms of media, audio and visual. And like I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I think that real conversations and discussion content is the only content format that I don't think AI is going to replace. So that is discuss, Discuss episodes. Ideally you have on audio and video, but then there's show and tell. So show episodes are great for video. They crush on YouTube, but they're not good for audio. And this is what the best explainer videos these days are. They are show videos. They're heavy visuals. It's animations, it's designed graphics. Every pixel matters. Think about creators like Callaway. Callaway is somebody who has blown up over the past couple of years. And Callaway spends a lot of money on editors and visual production. And the result is content that crushes on YouTube because as he's explaining things, there's all these fancy visuals that's showing you what he's talking about. And people will sit and stare at it for 30, 40, sometimes 60 minutes, and he gets 2 million views. But the more your content relies on visuals, the less it works on audio. Think about when you listen to a podcast that is like diary of a CEO that has like, a trailer at the beginning, and there's all these like. And there's just tons of stuff going on. And when you listen, you really don't know what's happening. Well, that stuff crushes on YouTube. YouTube's a huge growth strategy for that show. So they know that, and they're like, all right, cool. We're willing to sacrifice the audio listeners because they're going to stick around anyway and just skip this part. Whereas, you know, we need the crazy whiz bang visuals for people to pay attention on YouTube. So show content is YouTube content is video content. It doesn't transfer as well to Spotify or Apple, which is where people consume passively. Because I don't know about you, but I don't think many people so far are sitting around watching videos on Spotify. I could be wrong. Now, the thing about show content is that it is expensive and time consuming to create. You need scripting, you need to prepare ahead of time. You need to think about the words that you're saying and think about what you're showing. So you need either a team that can handle the visual component, or for many business owners, the best way to make show videos is with whiteboarding. Some of my best YouTube videos are me using my iPad as a whiteboard. And people stick around because they can watch. Like, watching someone draw on a whiteboard is engaging. So that's show content. Telepisodes do very well on audio, but they're not so good for video. They really don't perform well. And tel episodes are what most solo podcast episodes are. You're talking through an idea. You might be riffing. You might be more off the cuff, more conversational with yourself. It's more easy listening. People can Tune out. Tune back in. This is the format that you're hearing right now. This episode is not on YouTube. It's not video. It's only audio. This is the format that I've been doing for years, and on audio, people love it. They put it on while they're driving, while they're doing something else. And because it's just you talking through something in depth, it builds deep trust with the people who already know you. If you're hearing my voice right now, odds are probably you trust me a little bit. I love you for that. This is the content that gets people to buy, which, by the way, you should do if you haven't yet. Accelerator, growtheshow.com but this type of stuff doesn't translate well to video. Can you imagine if you were sitting at your computer right now just watching me say these things? It doesn't happen. And a total stranger is not going to sit and watch you talk for 45 minutes on YouTube without a visual component. They might listen to you on audio if they've already been introduced to to you from elsewhere. But on YouTube, where people are mostly strangers, it's a tough sell. Now, what's nice about tell content is that it's easy to make. Entrepreneurs love it because you can just riff. We love to talk, we love to yap, we love to think about ideas. You just sit down, you riff, you have ideas, you're passionate, you can digress, and people stick with you. But on YouTube, it's fighting an uphill battle, because on YouTube, you're asking strangers to stare at a talking head for an hour. Think about this like a book, right? So somebody will write a book, and people read that book actively. Then they create an audio version of that book. It is an audiobook, and people listen to that. But what you've never seen is a video of somebody reciting a book. No. That becomes a movie. Think about how much more expensive it is to make a movie out of a book. You got to keep people watching. It's just a whole different game. So once I had this framework in mind, I could finally see what where I was getting YouTube wrong and also where I was kind of sacrificing my audio listeners a little bit. So for the past year, I had been unintentionally straddling the line between show and tell. Some videos that I made were scripted, and I hired expensive editors that added animations. Others were me just, like, talking stuff off the cuff. Some were whiteboards. I was in that messy middle. And the messy middle sucks in both Places. So that expensive video that I made, it was a heavily scripted, show style video. I was like, all right, I'm going to try this Callaway thing. I'm going to hire a more expensive editing team that specializes in animations. I put real effort into the animations and the visuals. I spent like six to eight hours on the script. And after all that, the video was like 10 minutes long. And it was a good video. Like, it's done well, it's gotten some views, but the average view duration was super low, which meant that the total watch time was low, which meant that YouTube didn't really push the video. So all of that effort and money and like the average view duration was like three minutes. I'm like, oh my gosh, it underperformed all of my regular stuff. And when that happened, when I like dumped hundreds of dollars, I mean, it might have been over a thousand dollars in that one video alone. I was like, okay, this is not where my strengths are. My strengths are writing and talking audio and written, not so much producing highly visual YouTube content. And with that admission to myself, maybe permission to not be a YouTuber and to instead lean into my strengths, I found a new sense of life in my own content. But what's funny about that is now that I know that tell content just doesn't do super well on YouTube. Ironically, I put more tel content on YouTube because I don't care that it doesn't do well. And I understand why it's not going to do well. So I don't. I'm like, I'll just put it up. If people like it, they like it. And what's funny about that is it's starting to do better. So maybe that undoes everything that I've said. But what does all of this mean for you and how you publish your podcast? Well, not every episode needs to be on YouTube. I know that that might sound weird coming from me. I've spent the last year telling everyone to get on YouTube. And I still believe that YouTube is the number one daily growth strategy for podcasters. Right now. I think it is the best bang for your buck. You have to spend time and energy growing your show. You have to. You cannot just record audio and put it on a feed. You have to do something else. You must either get good at YouTube or. Or you must grow your audience on social media, or you must be on a podcast every week, or there's something else that you have to do to grow audio. But when you get the packaging right and the takeoff sequence rate on YouTube, your show can grow every single day without any extra effort. That's why I recommend it so much. It's rare, it's powerful. But not every piece of content that you make in long form is meant for video. Colin and Samir, who are two of the most respected voices in the creator economy, have said that sometimes when they're making an episode, they know even before they record that it's audio only. It's not not a video episode. And that's fine. They got like millions of subscribers on YouTube. YouTube has still driven tremendous growth for their show, but they're like, yeah, this is audio only. And those episodes do great. Now the question that I still get all the time though is, can I be an audio only podcaster and still grow? And I kind of just already gave away this answer. The answer is yes, but you have to be honest about what that requires. If you are audio only, you cannot just publish episodes and expect your show to grow. It just does not happen. Audio platforms do not have a meaningful discovery algorithm. Spotify kind of does, but even then they're prioritizing video shows. So if you're audio only, you need something to happen every single day to bring new people in. And that means one of four things. Either you are going on a ton of other podcasts, or you're doing tons of direct outreach like DMing or emailing. Or maybe you're building a social media platform. Maybe you become a short form person, or you become a writer on X or something like that. Or you spend money on ads, not to your podcast, but to a product or service and you funnel those leads to the podcast. I repeat, do not spend ads to your podcast. So one of those things needs to be happening daily or your audio show is not growing to grow. Right? It's like if you were to open a bakery on a desert island. You can't just open the bakery. It doesn't matter how good the cupcakes are. Nobody's showing up unless something's happening to bring people to that island every single day. Okay. YouTube is like opening a bakery in Times Square. If you do things right and you understand packaging, the takeoff sequence, those types of things, you're going to do fine. So with all that in mind, here's how I think about this now. Discussion episodes. You publish as video. This is your fastest growth lever. Two people talking works on every single platform. If your goal is to grow, I do recommend discussion content. If you're doing solos. If you're doing tell, lean into audio. Except that your tell episodes probably aren't going to grow your YouTube channel, and that's okay. They build deep trust with the audience that you already have. And if you do, publish them as video, maybe add a light visual layer like drawing on an iPad or a whiteboard or even just putting up your outline. I've seen some people do well where they have an outline for what they want to say and they just screen share it. It works. Then you have your show episodes where you generally have to prepare ahead of time. You have to think about what the visuals are, or if you don't do that, you have to pay a team that can do that. You know, send your recording off to somebody who can create all the visuals and animations. In Whiz bank, the production bar is sky high. Competition is fierce. Hollywood is getting in on the game. So if you want to do that, you can. But for me, I'm like, all right, I'm going to stick with what I know, and I'm going to stick with tell and maybe some light show on YouTube. But I know for me, YouTube show is not going to be the thing. It's going to be tell and discuss. That's where I shine. So above all else, know which type of episode you're making before you hit record. If you're in the messy middle where you're sort of showing, you're not really showing, you're kind of telling and you're stuck, that might be some of the reason why, particularly on YouTube, you might be, you know, making different types of content, treating it all the same. And above all else, you know, if you're just recording of yourself, talking into a video and putting that video up on YouTube, probably not going to be explosive growth that comes from that. So, in summary, not every podcast episode needs to be on YouTube. Some of them are just meant to be heard, like this one. And that's okay. So that's gonna do it for this episode of Grow the Show. If you're a business owner and your podcast is not bringing real ROI from your business, go to the link in the show notes, book a call with me, and let's talk about why and see if we can fix it. If not, my name is Kev Michael, and I will see you next week.