Spotify Out To Break YouTube’s Lead On Video Podcasts

As fans increasingly flock to videos of star hosts interacting with their guests during interviews, Spotify wants to persuade more podcasters to make videos for its own platform in addition to YouTube. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, Spotify plans to start paying hosts who make popular videos and meet a certain viewing threshold, and will soon offer premium subscribers a way to watch shows such as “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain” without ads. It currently allows hosts to upload podcast videos, but doesn’t offer such payments.

While Spotify is home to some of the most listened-to podcasts, there are signs that its dominance in the exploding medium is waning as more listeners watch, or listen to, their favorite shows on YouTube. The Google-owned platform has become a central part of many young people’s entertainment diet and shares ad revenue with creators who post videos, which incentivizes them to post ever more content.

“It’s becoming all about video. It’s kind of an irony,” Spotify Chief Executive Daniel Ek said of podcasting. He said the election highlighted the power of the medium, pointing to Kamala Harris’s appearance on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” and Donald Trump’s appearance on Rogan—both in video format. 

Beginning in January, Spotify plans to offer premium subscribers in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada ad-free viewing of video podcasts. It is betting that the uninterrupted experience coupled with its powerful discovery algorithms will drive greater consumption of video podcasts on the platform. The offering, which takes out ads inserted into episodes but would leave host-read messages, could also differentiate Spotify’s podcast videos from those on YouTube, where users have to pay more for ad-free viewing. 

For hosts, Spotify’s new incentives offer a fresh stream of revenue. While Spotify expects to pay more than YouTube on a per-view basis, it said YouTube has many more users and will likely continue to pay more in total to creators. 

YouTube pays out most video creators a 55% share of revenue of the ads it sells against a show. Spotify estimates a show that draws 1 million to 2 million views in a month would earn about $50,000 via the new model. 

After starting to invest in podcasting in 2019, Spotify overtook Apple to become the No. 1 podcast platform in the U.S. in 2021. Last month, YouTube rose to the top as the most popular service for podcast listening in the U.S., with 31% of weekly podcast listeners ages 13 and up choosing YouTube as the service they use most to listen to podcasts, surpassing Spotify, Edison Research shows.

Spotify says more than 240 million users have streamed a video podcast on Spotify, and the number of creators actively publishing videos each month has grown more than 50% year-over-year.