YouTube would offer a tidy sum to some podcasters to produce videos and host them on its platform. According to Bloomberg, some creators were offered $50,000 to take the plunge. For others, more important still, this sum rose up to $300,000.
The operation is far from trivial for YouTube. Some of its creators are starting to invest more time and money into the audio format to create podcasts, a growing format all over the world. Technically less cumbersome to produce, the podcast is also a way to develop your audience, “ the objective is to find other audiences, who are not on the video or on the book explained Benjamin Brillaud, from the Nota Bene channel.
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On the other hand, if YouTube has long been confined to video alone, the social network has often been an additional distribution point for podcasters. Seeing Facebook, Linkedin, or even Twitter capitalize on audio even pushed him to action. In September 2021, Kai Chuk was thus promoted to the position of director of “podcasting”, without however linking this activity with the Google Podcasts platform. A month later, another job description appeared, focused on the technical development of audio on YouTube.
A passive time in the face of the development of the audio format, this strategy on YouTube’s side is ultimately not surprising. It remains to be seen if the arguments, financial for the moment, of Alphabet will be able to convince podcasters to consider YouTube as a distribution point worthy of the name.