I'm Renee your YouTube liaison and I'm Johanna the chief product officer at YouTube Johanna I want to talk to you about podcasts because when I say podcast the ogs will think back to hand coding media containers and RSS more recently maybe true crime serials or our favorite celebrity chat shows that we download to our phones but what does it mean for a video platform like YouTube I just came across the perfect example of you said True Crime of a true crime podcast that really exemplifies the creativity that you get with podcasts on YouTube I was
recommended this podcast the other night when I was cooking dinner and it's called Murder Mystery and makeup and so one thing that we've heard about podcasts on YouTube is people actually like a visual element and so this had this really creative and twist to that because it's a true crime podcast and this Creator tells um mystery stories while she's putting on her makeup and she's also like selling makeup in the description links so I just thought this was so creative and really exemplified why a visual platform like YouTube is so powerful for podcasts can you
tell us a little bit more about what YouTube is actually doing when it comes to podcasting when I think about how I approach product development we really try to meet users where they're at so we think about podcasting in two ways on the one hand you have the very traditional experience which is RSS um down download episodes highly productionize listening content and over the past year we've been spending a lot of time making the YouTube music app much better at supporting this kind of content and then the second way we think about podcasts is eyes
optional experience so stuff that's great to hear and listen to but also can be great to watch as well and that's available both on YouTube music and on YouTube main I listen to a ton of tech shows like the vergecast waveform twit but I also like stuff where I just enjoy the panelists like play watch listen what are some of your favorite podcasts and where do you listen to them I listen to some traditional podcasts like hard Fork is a traditional podcast I listen to but I also listen to a lot of eyes optional content
that you may or may not call a podcast one thing I listen to a lot is comedy and I listen to don't tell comedy comedy central a lot of um standup comedians actually have their own channels and where do I listen I'll listen in my car so I'll Len on my commute home to unwind when I get home I might pop it on my TV so I can watch while I'm cooking dinner and then that's cool because you can see what the people look like not just hear their voices or I might watch these as
I'm going to bed um just to unwind at the end of the day we just had this big change with Google podcasts migrating into YouTube music as this centralized destination for podcasts how are you thinking about YouTube music now as that engine for podcasts over the past year we've been working to to build in all of the traditional podcasting features to YouTube music the first thing we did was actually just pull in podcast content but then also traditional things like being able to play in a series continue watching have a shelf for Discovery and so
we want YouTube music to be that One-Stop shop for all of your listening we also have a Creator question this time from Emily D Baker I have had a podcast for quite a long time and I've been wondering would YouTube ever support RSS out for podcasts could I just host my podcast entirely on YouTube and for those of you who may not know what RSS out is it means that you could theoretically upload your podcast to YouTube YouTube would generate an RSS feed for that podcast and then broadcast it out for use by any other
podcast client well RSS out isn't on our road map right now but we do have the ability to support RSS in so that allows creators to unlock and have access to the two billion uh users and viewers that are already on our platform I've been podcasting since 2008 and the two biggest pain points that I've ever had are especially in the early days just how inaccessible Distributing video podcast really was for most people and continuously discovery not just getting my shows in front of an audience but the episodes and YouTube really does seem to solve
for both of those things I'm glad you hit on that because when I think about podcasts and YouTube the thing I'm most excited about is to Discovery because we spend so much time on building such a great discovery system our watch next our homepage our search tools and one of the challenges I've always found as a listener is like what should I listen to what podcasts are out there I have to ask my friends do I have the same tastes as them and so one of the coolest thing about YouTube is that we can bring
the power of our algorithms and our Discovery systems to podcasting yeah it's like digital Word of Mouth where in a traditional podcast world if I'm listening to mkbhd's waveform episode on the pixel phone maybe I'll get some other generic show suggestions at the bottom but with YouTube the recommendation system gives me these other specifically related podcast episodes and videos just right around the player and my show my pixel video could be there which is such a tremendous opportunity for growth and Discovery it's really neat because our Discovery systems and our watch next can highlight topics
can highlight creators can highlight key themes that were already in one podcast and recommend them in another one really cool example recently we had is we had Club Shae interview Cat Williams and this reached 65 million viewers and we're able to bring these together in a way that no other platform can and with the kind of scale that really is um unprecedented we have podcasters now uploading a lot of their back cataloges to YouTube and those were Audio Only they don't have a visual element and right now they they can put album AR on it
or they can put an image on it but is there any thought to maybe using AI to generate some sort of visualization or better viewing experience to go with all that back catalog content that is definitely definitely an interesting idea that we will takeen into account I think another thing that was cool about that question Renee was about the back catalog so there's a lot of recent new content that you see on YouTube as a viewer that you listen to as a viewer but also there's so many sleeper hits there's so so many things on
YouTube that were created in the past and you can listen to now so I think this is really going to be powerful for both our viewers and podcasters who want to upload um content that they've made in the past thank you so much Johanna I am loving this new series creators drop your questions in the comments and keep it real
