The New Age of Podcasting Has Begun

Podcast discoverability only exists in the ether.

It’s a faint idea of what could be.

What is it gonna take to achieve that? A rewire of the entire medium.

While Youtube is the gold standard (as of now) for discoverability of video as a marketplace, podcasting has a long flight ahead of them to reach that kind of oasis.

Enter Spotify, the leader in the race to help podcasts be heard.

Spotify has tripled the number of podcasts on its platform in the past year from 700,000 in Q4 2019 to 2.2. million today.[Axios] Everyone and their mother has a podcast, the age old question is how do you stand out from the noise, except the question gets exponentially harder when you don’t have a central marketplace as YouTube does.

If a podcast episode is a meal at Peter Luger, then podcast clips are the steak and the full podcast is now the cream of spinach.

We want that 40oz Porterhouse of spittin’ hot fire.

There are easily 10-15 podcasts we do not listen to, however, we will watch their clips all day long. The podcast problem is that most podcasts are too long for all of it be valuable. People want value more than ever, fluff does not cut it.

Some of the best creators in the world have figured out this predicament.

The biggest revelation to some of these creators is that clips can stand alone as their own unique videos. That idea flips the entire infrastructure of podcasting on its head.

Video won’t be the only way clips work.

Cliffs Notes-style sub-podcast channels will start appearing for all major podcast across streaming platforms. Spotify is working on creating more features for podcasters to use, even building a paid subscription model. So much more content and digestible pieces will start being made through this system.

Three hour podcasts will be for the deep community. The average person will want to hear a 7-10 min clips about specific topics from that show. These smaller assets will allow entry into a new podcast to feel less daunting.

We can talk high level all day, but every guru does that. We are gonna show you the real shit.

Joe Rogan

We have to talk about Joe Rogan here. We get it, there are haters, but he’s doing something right. Let’s take a step back from being a hater and respect the game.

Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast on the planet. Rogan understood not everyone had three hours to listen to his podcast, but he knew they were filled with interesting stories and ideas that people wanted to hear. The JRE clips YouTube channel was born.

Joe Rogan’s main channel has 10.4 million subscribers and the JRE clips channel has 5.8 million subscribers. Double the subs on the main channel, but look at the views:

Main channel views: 1.7 Billion

JRE Clips channel views: 3.9 Billion

INSANE numbers.

Important thing to note is that during his negotiation with Spotify, he negotiated to allow three clips per episode to be uploaded to YouTube still. Since the Spotify acquisition, he has started uploading the clips to his main channel which has seen views skyrocket after the main podcast episodes were no longer available on YouTube.

Club Shay Shay (Shannon Sharpe)

Shannon Sharpe is an on-air personality for FS1 and former NFL player. A very good one, might we add - 3x Super Bowl champion, and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Club Shay Shay is a weekly podcast hosted by Shannon. Each week he sits down with athletes, celebrities and influencers to break down, analyze and discuss the latest headlines in sports, pop culture and everything in-between.

This episode of the podcast on YouTube with Ndamukong Suh has 131,000 views on its own.

How is Shannon supplementing each episode?

He’s adding the full episode to a playlist that includes a multitude of clips.

Want to venture to guess how many views the clips have combined?

.

.

.

G’head, we’ll give you another second.

.

.

.

Over 700,000.

If you have an hour or more to spare to watch/listen to the whole show, great. But Shannon gives you the ability to set the playlist and listen to the highlights, giving you, the listener, the most opportunity to get what you want from the show.

Brilliant.

Colin and Samir

These two are some of the brightest young creators around, they know how the game is played. They are doing the research to understand macro trends of the creator economy in ways most most don’t see because they are in the creator economy themselves.

Colin and Samir saw this trend happening and quickly jumped in changing their YouTube podcast channel to strictly clips, and only posting the main podcast video on their main channel.

Recently they dove into the topic of podcasting clips. They are predicting David Dobrik will start a Views Clips channel that will launch his YouTube success to another level along with the main podcast channel, which will then do a $100mm sale to Spotify similar to Joe Rogan.

Whitney Cummings

Whitney is one of the top comics in the world. She is crafting a massive fan base through her podcast ‘Good For You’. Being a comedian this day and age is interesting.

People expect nonstop production of material. From the outside, as comics are working on new material for stage, clips help show their range, and that they truly are the funniest people on earth.

Comedy honestly might be the leader in the race to change up the podcast landscape. They are always on new frontiers of ideas and this is just another great example of how they innovate.

A couple of numbers, Whitney has 1.3 million Instagram followers, she is doing almost 200K views per clip. She is paving the way for using clips to provide entertainment on a daily basis.

It’s a new age of content development for comedians.

Pat McAfee

The king of Twitter clips is the man himself, Pat McAfee.

Pat hosts a show everyday with 30,000+ viewers live!

The problem for people like us, we don’t have the time to watch 3+ hours every day.

However, we watch almost every clip that lands on our Twitter timeline.

Pat is electric, he has breaking news, he has deep connection to athletes that ESPN reporters could never have. Oh, and did we mention most clips are doing 100,000 views each! He’s pulling over 30 clips from every single show and tweeting them out live.

Of course there is a team of people doing it, but that is not the point. The point is, we are fans and community members without listening to the show live. Through clips alone, we feel connected.

Jumpers Jump Podcast

These guys have taken TikTok by storm while amassing 2.3 million followers.

They are taking topics that aren’t conspiracy heavy, rather, a light hearted touch to Reddit theories. Their biggest differentiator is the creative and entertaining editing.

Each theory is broken into two clips. They drop in references, videos, photos, graphics, sound effects, using all of that to help progress the theory forward in their telling of it.

First time we stumbled upon these guys we couldn’t stop watching. Such a fresh perspective on podcasting clips. Even if we never listen to a full episode, we keep coming back watching new clips every week.

We don’t know the full podcast download numbers, but we do have clip views.

• 2.8M

• 5.1M

• 14.8M

• 1.3M

• 6.9M

• 9.8M

Pretty damn impressive.

BFF Podcast

Another controversial podcast is Barstool Sports BFF Podcast. Again, love or hate Dave Portnoy, here at Brainwork we respect the game.

Yep, it did feel weird when Dave (43) partnered up with Josh Richard (19) to start a podcast about internet gossip.

To be frank, we have never listened to an episode. That doesn’t mean we don’t see what they are doing. Their edited clips for the show are amazing. This level of entertainment keeps us watching anytime one pops up.

Utilizing TikTok as a major platform for distribution, Barstool is hitting the exact audience they wanted with their show. Clips after clip is going viral with Josh’s fanbase.

Gen Z was unsure at first about the podcast, now they are eating it up. Dave getting the scoop on beef between Bryce and Sway house members or Josh and Nessa’s relationship has the fans swarming on new clips.

Podcasting as a medium is getting flipped on its head. 1% of podcast being successful has now shrunk closer to 0.5%.

In a world of noise with no marketplace to filter it, creating a podcast to be just a podcast is almost idiotic. Full episode podcast are 2nd tier to clips for, at minimum, the next 6-12 months.

The first major platform to deliver a great marketplace experience for discovering new podcast will win just the way YouTube is.

However, creation of a successful marketplace will take guidance from the creators. Episode 000 doesn’t fly anymore for someone getting into a podcast that is 150 episodes deep. The entire system needs to be rewired to work for the consumer.

Our bet is entire channels will launch that use that hour of podcasting to create a months worth of YouTube videos and podcast episodes. It’s not repurposing anymore, its now batch/purposeful recording.

Podcasting is about to get super fascinating.