🔺🎧 Podcasts on YouTube grew 106% since 2019

YouTube Dominates Podcasts: 31% of Listeners Ditch Traditional Platforms

YouTube's rise as the go-to podcast destination is a wake-up call for creators still clinging to audio-only formats. With 31% of listeners now favoring YouTube over Spotify (21%) and Apple (12%), it's clear that the future of podcasting is visual. Creators ignoring this shift risk becoming irrelevant in an increasingly competitive landscape.

The platform's dominance isn't just about numbers; it's reshaping the entire podcast ecosystem. YouTube's search engine prowess makes it the ultimate discovery tool, leaving traditional podcast apps in the dust. This means creators must adapt or die – your SEO game needs to be on point, and your content needs to be visually compelling to stand out in the YouTube jungle.

Even those who have the video minimized or in the background on YouTube prefer the platform for its community and comments. Rumors are that Spotify may be working on comments - but is it too little too late?

Not all genres are created equal in this new visual world. News/Current Events and Sports podcasts thrive on YouTube, while True Crime still reigns supreme in the audio-only realm. This presents a unique challenge for creators – how do you pivot to more "watchable" content? The answer might determine whether you sink or swim in YouTube's podcast tsunami.

Twitch's Desperate Grab for Relevance: 70% of New Users Start on Mobile, but YouTube Still Dominates

Twitch is making a frantic push to stay relevant in the face of YouTube's growing dominance. With 70% of new viewers starting on mobile, Twitch's long-overdue app redesign feels like too little, too late. The platform's attempt to mimic YouTube's successful Shorts format with "Stories" and vertical clips reeks of desperation rather than innovation.

While Twitch touts new features like "Drop-ins" for easier collaborations, YouTube has long offered superior tools for creator partnerships. Twitch's "Power-ups" and "Creator Clubs" seem like pale imitations of YouTube's established Super Chat and community features. It's clear Twitch is playing catch-up, but will creators stick around long enough to see these changes implemented?

The introduction of the "Streamer Achievement Program" with its gaudy statues feels like a last-ditch effort to retain top talent. But with YouTube offering more lucrative contracts and a larger audience, will a purple statue be enough to keep creators from jumping ship? Twitch's desperation is palpable, and creators should be wary of investing too heavily in a platform that seems to be grasping at straws.

Are you a Twitch streamer? Send us a note about your Twitch vs YouTube experience, which platform you prefer, and why.

Creator Spotlight: RealLifeLore 

If you watch map-based content, you probably know RealLifeLore. With 7.5M subscribers, Joseph Pisenti, the creator behind the channel, has created more than 350 videos with a relentless weekly cadence of well-researched, amazingly scripted, and brilliantly edited videos.

All the videos on the channel are faceless but highly engaging. How does one create faceless videos of that quality?

By combining maps, charts, stock footage, and text graphics with that flawless narration, Joseph holds the attention of his viewers, deeply engaging them in topics they didn’t even know they needed to know about!

Every video in the channel meticulously lists the sources used in making the video - from MapTiler to OpenStreetMap to Getty Images and others, he uses a variety of sources to tell a compelling story!

Joseph’s success is phenomenal - his channel has over 1.6B views total and his videos over time have averaged 4.6M views! This makes him an elite YouTuber by all measures, even though people are only familiar with his voice and not his face.

While faceless video content can be very tempting for beginners, it takes a long time to research, write a script, and collect all the visuals to tell compelling stories that combine maps and charts. Even at his scale, Joseph only averages one video a week.

But if you are willing to put in the work, these videos do exceptionally well and can be highly monetizable.

To help create compelling faceless videos, Rizzle offers editorial and creative stock media from Getty Images, maps from MapTiler, and charts and stats from Statista as part of the subscription.

Make your videos compelling without spending a ton on licensing great content or spending days editing map screenshots or other visuals. Write to us with your use case to get an invite to a demo.

In other news…

• YouTube came up with something useful: an “erase” tool to get rid of copyrighted music without affecting the remaining audio. Not bad. Does this mean that your video can continue to monetize by simply complying to a copyright claim and allowing YouTube to “erase” that music? Keep in mind this is not magic - if the music is more complex or integrated into your audio more natively at various places, you may have to mute those parts. But it’s nice to have a little support to identify the problematic parts!

• In an ironic take, Google researchers published a paper on how AI is ruining the Internet. "Manipulation of human likeness and falsification of evidence underlie the most prevalent tactics in real-world cases of misuse," the researchers conclude. This is coming to video at scale. But then, porn was the leading use case for the Internet itself at scale. We’ll find a way to sort this out. But keep your creativity and personality at the centre of your content to stand out!

• For some worldly fun: There’s a new kid on the social media block: Noplace is topping the charts for the latest hit social media app. We’ve come full circle to text-based social media. This app apparently combines the best of X and MySpace - stranger things have happened but MySpace? Really?