Google Podcasts heads to an upstate farm run by Marc Maron and Sarah Koenig, The app has been round since 2018, but it surely’s by no means come near the sort of mass adoption loved by opponents Overcast, Spotify, and Spotify. In different phrases, do not feel unhealthy in case you’ve by no means heard of it.
Your complete service is built-in into YouTube and its companion app YouTube Music. That is for good cause, as YouTube is already a preferred vacation spot for podcast followers. In line with statistics supplied by Edison Analysis and… YouTube serves 23 % of podcast listeners in the US. Google Podcasts, alternatively, accounts for less than 4 % of listeners, regardless of having podcasts proper within the title. It is simpler to select up stakes and head to the place the fish are than it’s to attempt to lure fish to a random podcast app that nobody is aware of about.
YouTube introduced that 2024 will see a major improve in its “funding within the podcast expertise,” proper after father or mother firm Alphabet put the kibosh on Google’s devoted app. And it appears to be like like YouTube Music will get the lion’s share of those investments, with upcoming “highly effective creation and evaluation instruments,” in addition to streamlined RSS uploads for podcasters.
The corporate can be promising to develop the flexibility to hearken to podcasts in additional areas, noting that they are going to be accessible “all over the place YouTube Music listeners already eat their favourite content material — within the background, within the automotive, offline, and extra.” Moreover, new “YouTube-only” instruments and capabilities shall be coming to podcasts on YouTube Music, although Google stays coy in regards to the particulars.
As for present Google Podcasts customers, there shall be a “easy migration instrument” to assist with the transition to YouTube Music. You may additionally have the ability to manually add podcast RSS feeds to your YouTube Music library. The corporate even introduced choices so as to add present podcast subscriptions to competing platforms, in case you simply wish to begin over. Google remains to be gathering suggestions on the migration, so a few of these options are topic to alter earlier than subsequent yr.
This is not the primary massive transfer YouTube Music has taken this yr to shore up a few of that candy podcast cash. Again in April, the app launched the flexibility to observe and hearken to podcasts, although you continue to battle with that YouTube Music podcasts are already full-featured, with offline downloading, background playback, and the flexibility to change between audio and video content material on good audio system.