Podcast Production Basics

This week, we announced that YouTube surpassed 1 billion monthly active podcast users. According to Edison, YouTube, including YouTube Music, is now the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the US. At the end of last year, we also announced that YouTube viewers are watching over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on devices in the living room. These are major milestones that reflect the years of investment and focus we’ve made to improve the podcast experience on YouTube for both podcasters and listeners. Creators are meeting their fans where they already are: YouTube. They’re uploading videos that complement their audio recordings, giving fans an entirely new view into their content. Much like popular talk shows and talk show hosts of an earlier era, top podcasts are building connections with audiences by presenting more of themselves - which in many cases means literally presenting themselves on video for the first time. And it’s clear that younger audiences care less about how they’re consuming content (watching vs. listening), and more about discovering new content and connecting with their favorite creators. For creators, we’ve empowered podcasters with tools to create, grow and monetize their shows and have simplified onboarding with RSS ingestion. On the listening side, we’ve made it easier for people to find podcasts they love through improved search, recommendations and dedicated shelves. We’ve also improved the podcast listening experience on YouTube Music by adding features like background playback, audio-only mode and seamless switching between audio and video. There’s still more to do, and we’ll keep focusing on our users and building products to meet their needs. Thank you to our Creators, Podcasters, and teams at YouTube - this is only the beginning! Read more on the YouTube blog: https://lnkd.in/gFqyjFrd

My latest: The Wondery layoffs this week suggest we've officially exited the 'Serial' podcasting era and are entering one built around video. The signs are everywhere: video-centric personalities are minting massive deals for their shows and selling out arenas. Platforms like Spotify are turning their attention to video over audio, and the top of various charts are video-first programs. This doesn't mean audio is going away. The audiences that flocked to Wondery and Gimlet Media and other viral audio shows, like THE TELEPATHY TAPES, still exist. Big video shows need their audio ad inventory and aren't willing to lose it. And even Amazon isn't giving up on audio journalism. The retailer is restructuring the business into Audible, suggesting the company believes ads aren't the most effective way to make money in limited series audio. Instead, it might be better to offer new narrative series as part of an existing audiobook subscription or as one-off unit sales. This makes sense to me! The Wondery news, taken with Spotify’s past layoffs and the closure of other studios, illustrates that audio journalism on its own isn’t a big enough business line for tech giants generating billions of dollars a year. But it doesn’t mean that all the people who like audio programming have fled to YouTube. Still, there are big problems for the audio world. Will ad revenue in audio podcasts keep growing or will video shows curb it? The de-funding of public media is a huge hit to the pipeline of talent who learn the ropes in that world and go on to create their own programs. And with Wondery's changes, there are now even fewer places to shop a program. But people working in audio can still capitalize on the video-fueled gold rush that's coming -- they just have to adapt. We’re about to find out how quickly they can do so. I riffed on this and more in my newsletter this week. You can read it below, and if you like this kind of work, please subscribe! https://lnkd.in/e_PWa9S4

🎧 We’ve been experimenting with something new in internal comms… and it’s working! I’m currently running a pilot for a client where we embed short voice notes from leadership into their monthly internal comms email newsletters. No scripts, no studio polish, just leaders speaking directly to their teams instead of dense blocks of text. Our initial research showed that people were feeling disconnected from leadership, siloed, and often unsure why certain strategic decisions were being made. Increasingly, it’s the why people crave, not just the what. So we gave leaders a new way to tell their own stories via short, honest voice notes explaining their decisions in their own words. The tech setup is simple: a mic, a laptop, and a willingness to hit record, and the plan is that leaders will, from now on, be passing the mic around, depending on the business's priorities and who has a good story to tell. And it’s proving to be a real winner so far. I can’t share stats (they’re obvs confidential), but the buy-in from leadership has been fantastic. What’s been fascinating is how the tone changes when leaders speak naturally. Executives who seem distant in text suddenly sound warm, human, approachable, even funny. This is a real step change for employees used to overly corporate-sounding, text-based communication. This small shift makes a big difference. Hearing someone’s real voice, the tone, warmth, humour, and imperfection, builds connection and belonging in a way no written update ever could. It’s also backed by what we’re seeing globally: • Podcasts and audio formats continue to grow as trusted sources of information. Employees retain up to 15% more from what they hear than what they read (Edison Research). • 73% of employees say they’d rather listen to a company update than attend a meeting (uStudio). No surprises there! • And as inbox fatigue deepens, voice is cutting through where text can’t. It feels more honest, human, and memorable. Leaders in this pilot are discovering that speaking directly, not perfectly, brings a kind of authenticity that can’t be faked. It’s helping a large organisation sound smaller, warmer, and more connected. It’s early days, but it feels like the start of something important: using email not just to inform, but to connect. Has anyone else been experimenting with voice in internal comms? I’d love to hear what you’re seeing. #internalcommunications #employeeexperience #leadershipcommunications #audiocomms #digitalworkplace

First month down as an independent podcaster. A quick recap of what I’ve learned + game plan to make this huge: 1. Downloads are at 70% of where they were before my 8-month hiatus. Honestly higher than I expected. Shows the value of owning the feed & the intimacy of a podcast relationship. 2. Talking to my audience is a great way to stay motivated when numbers are still relatively small. I ask my listeners to email me at the top of every episode. Hearing how much Founder’s Journal helps them with their business gives me more than enough fire to do this for a long time. 3. Working with sponsors (like Gusto) that you actually believe in & are a customer of, makes the advertising business actually fun. I don’t feel slimy & I want to go out of my way to overdeliver for them. 4. Filled closets are exceptional studios if you don’t have a professional one. I recorded today’s episode in my mom’s closet with a Shure MV7, and you’d never know I had such a janky set up. 5. Evergreen shows have a crazy long tail. 38% of my monthly downloads came from episodes not recorded this month. This means 2 things: making episodes easily discoverable is crucial since people treat the show as service content & selling the back catalog is as important as selling new episodes. 6. Like any business, the market you pick for a podcast is everything. Because my show is for startup founders, there will always be more advertiser demand than quality supply. That means I can monetize this show at high CPMs without needing to dilute the content in search of a massive audience. 7. Have a YouTube native version of your podcast. Given how bad discoverability in podcasts is, creating top of funnel on the largest search engine in the world is (almost) always the right move. I plan to bring Founder’s Journal to YT in the coming weeks. 8. Niche is generally better in media & podcasts are no exception. Be niche in topic (How I Write by David Perell) or niche in format (Founders by David Senra) My niche is short-form (<20 min) solo records by founders. 9. A podcast is a living breathing organism. Every media franchise has an arc of relevancy and the only way to stay relevant for a long time (>3 years) is to keep evolving the show based on what your audience wants. It’s why having 2-way conversation with your community is so important. 10. I plan to get my pod to 5x per week. Why? More surface area for discovery & word of mouth. More opportunity to create daily habit. More founder voices to highlight beyond my own. One thought is creating a “Residency,” where I get 3-4 other founders (in different industries/stages) to host one episode per week for a quarter. 11. Far more valuable then the advertising business is the lead gen that the pod creates for all of my portfolio companies, where the LTV of a customer is in the tens of thousands. This is generally true for B2B pods. Reply below if you have any questions about podcast strategy I can answer.

This year I’ve been on 100+ podcasts which account for more than 50% of all of our inbound. For every podcast, it’s important for me to get the most scale out of every asset that I can pull. For most people, that’s where the leverage stops. Episode drops → one or two promo assets → onto the next one. But if you’re doing that, you’re leaving a ton of scale on the table. Because every episode actually contains: -Multiple sharp, 30–60 second takes -Reusable stories and frameworks -Hooks that could live on LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts, your site, email… The real game isn’t “be on more podcasts.” It’s: get the right clips out of every appearance and put them back to work everywhere. That’s what I started doing with Goldcast's new Agentic Video Editor. I take all of my appearances and drop them straight into Goldcast. The Agentic Video Editor analyzed everything and surfaced the exact moments where I was really on a roll: -Clean, self-contained clips -Strong hooks and one-liners -Segments where I’m explaining a framework or telling a story Instead of me hunting through 60-minute recordings, it did the first draft of “here are the clips worth scaling.” From there, I turned those moments into a whole library of ready-to-publish clips in a fraction of the time it would normally take. The AI handled the grunt work: -Auto captions I could quickly tweak -Smart scene changes so clips feel dynamic, not like a Zoom rip -On-screen callouts for the big ideas or quotable lines -Suggested b-roll and background music to keep people watching The result? Every podcast appearance now turns into: 1️⃣ A set of short clips for social 2️⃣ Mid-length cuts for landing pages, nurture, or sales enablement 3️⃣ A searchable library of “my best answers” on core topics Same recordings. Way more surface area. Way longer shelf life. If you’ve spent the year doing podcasts and panels, Goldcast’s Agentic Video Editor is the fastest way I’ve found to: Turn scattered interviews into a clip library And turn that clip library into real distribution—across every channel your buyers actually hang out on. #GoldcastPartner

In 1996, HBO told the world: "It's not TV. It's HBO." In 2025, YouTube said: "YouTube IS TV." Both statements were positioning genius. HBO was telling premium subscribers they were buying something above television: prestige and originality that justified a monthly fee on top of cable. YouTube was telling advertisers the opposite: that the biggest screen in the house now belonged to them. But between those two slogans, separated by nearly thirty years, what counts as "television" has stretched further than ever. In this week's Streamonomics®, I break down three storylines that help explain why: → Video podcasts are becoming TV, starting with daytime (a daypart underinvested by both linear and premium streaming). Apple just announced native video support for podcasts. Meanwhile, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Tubi are all licensing and/or commissioning, with other streamers making offers. There's a wide range of visual aesthetics, storytelling and interviewing skills, production qualities and economics, but the bar is only going up. Video podcasts that were only available on YouTube a year ago are now sharing shelf-space with Stranger Things. → Vertical Video is a third audiovisual language. Not a format. A language. Film. TV. Vertical. Microdramas (which are as divisive as podcasts were before them) are just the first scripted expression; at 3% of vertical video's $100B+ market. The canvas will expand to capture every genre of television, then every subgenre. → AI will close the production gap, not the storytelling gap. The still ongoing "SaaSpocalypse" rattled software stocks. Then came Seedance 2.0, which rattled media stocks (as I call it, the "AI Flu") and provoked a strong counter-reaction, uniting studios and talent, and prompting Seedance to delay the availability of their API in the US. Though the direction is clear: as entrepreneurial creators and studios are able to produce more, supply will increase, so will discovery challenges. Both HBO and YouTube are again in the news today. HBO parent WB is deciding who's going to be their next owner: Netflix or Paramount, which submitted a new bid last night. And YouTube is rumored to be the front-runner for a new package of 4 NFL games. THE BIGGER PICTURE: TV didn't kill Film. Vertical won't kill TV or Film. Each new audiovisual language expanded the market; each new format expanded what counts as television. The question for leaders, talent, creators, entrepreneurs, is how to capture the gains from the next wave of expansion. I cover this in depth tomorrow. Subscribe to Streamonomics® for free (link under my name). Owl & Co clients get it a day early, with exclusive insights.

What drives a woman start her own podcast? That was the question Stella Kasdagli from WHEN.org.gr asked me, Marianna Skylakaki, Elita Sfakiotaki and Evi Makri yesterday. And we all said pretty much the same thing: At one point, we felt that there were things left unsaid, there were discussions that should be happening but weren’t, and there were (pain) points not being made enough. For those of you thinking of starting your own #podcast, I’ll note down here some of the #tips we shared yesterday: 1) podcasts can be low budget, as well as high budget. If you’re new at this, start low, gain experience, get better before you start investing. 2) if you do want to go to the next level though, you do need to invest. Content is king, but never underestimate the importance of quality sound and a 4K video. 3) consistency is everything: towards the community build, towards the audience, towards frequency of publishing, towards the identity of the podcast. 4) have a plan upfront. Why do you want to do a podcast ? What’s your goal? Is it a hobby or are you planning to turn it into a profession? What are your monetising options and what’s your growth strategy? These questions are better answered from the beginning. 5) have a clear guest strategy. For me for example, it was all about the topics. I knew the topics I wanted to cover, and then I would choose a guest based on the angle I had chosen to pursue for the particular topic, and that’s why several times I had to refuse amazing guests who wanted to come, just because the topics they would speak about were not part of my agenda at the particular time. For other podcasters, guests are part of their marketing strategy: they choose high visibility people and view them not only as guests, but as collaborators. Both can work, just think it through. Oh, and: 6) don’t forget the guest release form. GDPR is real. 7) you need to be ready for the exposure. Having a podcast is like opening a door: it will bring you fresh air, but occasionally there might be storm as well. 8) if you’re stressed about the technical stuff, hire an expert, and if you can’t hire expert, find collaborators. Synergy always brings accumulative results, plus it’s always more fun building with others. And I think I’ve covered most of it. Do you have any more questions? Write them in the comments 👇🏻

With the rollout of iOS 26.4 and the use of Apple's HLS protocol, Apple is upgrading its Podcasts app to bring what it calls "𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 𝗽𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀" to creators and listeners. The new enhanced video podcast experience will allow users to seamlessly switch between viewing a video podcast and listening to its audio, and will support dynamically inserted video ads in Apple’s Podcasts app. Apple has supported podcast video formats for over 10 years, but distribution was via RSS. So any creator who had audio-only and video versions of a podcast was required to create two separate show entries in Apple Podcasts. Apple says it does not charge hosting providers or creators to distribute podcasts on Apple Podcasts, whether via traditional RSS/MP3 or HLS video, but will charge participating ad networks an impression-based fee for the delivery of dynamic ads in HLS video on Apple Podcasts starting later this year. The fee was not disclosed. Companies initially supporting HLS video in Apple Podcasts include Acast, ART19 (an Amazon company), Triton Digital’s Omny Studio (part of iHeartMedia), SiriusXM Media and Simplecast. iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, and visionOS 26.4 are all in beta, and the new functionality will come to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro users, as well as via Apple Podcasts on the web this spring. Apple press release: https://lnkd.in/gNcfy4uv - #podcasts #applepodcasts #applepodcast #streamingmedia

What makes for a great podcast? You might think it's about great studio setup, famous celebrities, naturally viral moments, fancy editing gimmicks... basically expensive productions about famous people. Yes that definitely helps. But it doesn't explain why relative nobodies keep breaking through and building huge audiences with just a mic, webcam and Zoom. No, it isn't about money or fame. The secret to success is, in order: 1. Why: Why are people going to tune into your show? Who is the show for and is your planned content going to be so relatable and impactful for them on a sustained basis that they can't wait for you to drop the next episode? 2. Who: Who is on the show? Are they people your audience will care about? And no, it's not just about celebrities. Regular people with gripping stories or deep expertise have the same effect. 3. What: What will you discuss? Is it what your audience wants to know and have you planned out the discussion so as to sustain their interest? [Side note: Those 'viral moments' you see playing as Reels from popular podcasts? Almost all are pre-planned and engineered. Perhaps even shot repeatedly till they got it just right :)] 4. How: Is the discussion free-flowing and natural? Is there chemistry between the speakers? Or does it feel forced, stilted or overly-scripted? 5. Pacing: Does the episode feel fast-paced and interesting or does it get bogged down in irrelevant chit-chat and long-winded introductions? 6. Production: And here, right at the end, comes production. A fancy setup can make a good podcast great, but it will never compensate for poor content delivered in an uninteresting way. This does not mean you never explore studios. Apart from the look, they also make recording very easy and reliable, which alone is a great reason to use one. But, if you are on a tight budget, just get a mic, record on your phone and focus instead on excellent content. --- I'm Amit, founder of CrazyTok. We help people build their brands online through Podcasts, Youtube channels and LinkedIn. Get in touch for free advice and affordable, hassle-free services. #podcastagency #podcastproduction #podcast

How to Make Great Use of the New-Look Audio Events on LinkedIn   It’s almost 2 months since LinkedIn dropped its bombshell announcement of the retirement of in-platform audio events.   Audio hosts were given very little time to change to the LinkedIn live platform and on December 31 they were discontinued.   Since then hosts have raced to adapt. Some returned to Clubhouse, some have signed up to third-party apps for hosting, and others – like us – already doing live-streams began testing out the new format.   We’d been using the previous platform for as long as it had been available and found workarounds for its major drawbacks – no replay or in-event comments. It was easy to set up and use. But it was glitchy and constantly dumped people out.   The new version is a different beast entirely. Replays and comment functions are in-built. But it takes learning a new platform or app. It takes payment of a subscription for best results. And (for me at least) it needs an extra pair of hands behind the scenes.   All this aside, I’m fascinated by how this will change the events themselves. No longer do they have to be audio-only. Now: 🔷 Hosts and guests can have their cameras on so we can see them while they’re talking. 🔷 We can share visuals such as images, presentations, videos and (I’m hoping) live-screens. 🔷 The comments being made by attendees can display right alongside the speakers. Even more options may become obvious over time.   All this is a fundamental change to what we understand audio events to be. Simply put, they are no longer audio-only, they are a multi-media mix that moves them so close to video livestreams as to be almost indistinguishable.   Understandably, many are bitterly disappointed by this but I believe it opens the doors to new and intriguing opportunities!   None of us knows whether the brave new world for audio events will prove popular with LinkedIn members. We don’t know if hosts will find the expense, resources and knowledge required worth the effort. And we don’t know if speakers will be as willing to take the stage when it’s with cameras on.   But the adventure is underway and each audio event we hold is another opportunity to experiment. If you’d like to see where we’ve got to with this, join us later in the week. Details below in the comments.   🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷   Don't know me? I'm Lynnaire Johnston: a LinkedIn specialist who shares tips and ideas to help you get best results for your time here.   Learn how to leverage LinkedIn™ to achieve your professional goals at linkability[.]biz and follow our page Link∙Ability, for #linkedintips and #linkedinforbusiness ideas.   Got something to add? 🔷 COMMENT 🔷 Would others find it useful? 🔷 REPOST 🔷 Want to see more like this? 🔷 🔔 🔷 Plan to refer back to this? 🔷 SAVE 🔷 Think I know my stuff? 🔷 ENDORSE 🔷   📌📌📌 Tip of the day – Want to surprise and delight new connections? Send them a short video welcoming them to your network.