YouTube
YouTube podcasts are officially here.
Instead of getting a standalone app for YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV, podcasts will be part of YouTube Music. Google says app podcast support is now rolling out in the US. The move follows the launch of youtube.com/podcasts on the web last year.
YouTube Music gets a lot of flak for being extremely limited unless you pay for it, with Google paywalling features like background playback and offline playback, but the company says “this podcast listening experience is different from our music listening experience” and that these features are free for podcasting.
Of course, people have been posting podcasts to YouTube forever, even without Google’s official support. However, it sounds easy to install on the official track, even for old content. Podcasts on YouTube are just video playlists with a special “podcast” flag. In YouTube Studio, creators can tag existing playlists as podcasts to post the episodes on the podcast pages and have them appear in the YouTube Music app. It’s also easy to pop new content into your existing podcast playlist while uploading. The only real requirement is to include a special square podcast thumbnail. There is currently no support for uploading audio via RSS feeds, but according to Google it will be in the future.
youtube podcasts badges.
Google says it will start promoting podcasts on the “Home” and “Explore” pages of the YouTube Music app, and the demo screenshots highlight popular shows and episodes, with different categories for people to browse. All of the usual YouTube monetization options still apply, although YouTube Premium users, who pay a fee not to see ads, still have to deal with baked-in podcast ads. It doesn’t seem possible to pay for ad-free podcasts at the moment.
Google says podcasts will be rolled out to other countries in the future. There’s still no word on what will happen to Google other current podcast app, Google Podcasts, but it will probably close eventually. This is Google’s fourth foray into podcasting after Google Listen (2009–2012), Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020), and Google Podcasts (2018).
List image by Future Publishing | Getty Images
