Should You Publish Your Podcast RSS Feed to YouTube? It Depends

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I'm Danny Brown,

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and you're listening to One Minute Podcast Tips,

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in just a minute a week.

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at oneminutepodcasttips.com/support.

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And now, this week's episode.

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Earlier this year, YouTube announced

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they were going to start supporting

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RSS feed ingestion to YouTube.

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Basically, this meant you could take your RSS feed from your podcast host and easily add it to YouTube.

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YouTube would then turn your audio episodes into static videos and publish them on YouTube as well as YouTube Music.

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This obviously opens up your podcast to a wider audience, especially given YouTube is the number two search engine in the world.

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So it looked like a great way for podcasters that only had audio shows to grow their audience.

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YouTube's now opened that up to all podcasters and it's really easy to do.

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I actually created a video showing you the steps and I'll link to that in the show notes if you want to check that out.

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However, there are some things you should be aware of.

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The first thing is YouTube re-hosts the audio.

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So basically what this means is,

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instead of pulling directly from your RSS feed,

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they actually store the files on YouTube

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because they have to turn your audio into a static video.

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Now because they store the files on YouTube,

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it means that you won't see any plays or listens

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of your audio files on YouTube

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in your podcast host's analytics.

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Instead, you have to be logged into YouTube

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to actually view these analytics.

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Additionally, if you need to change the episode audio file,

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you would normally just do that at your podcast host

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and the new file would be sent through to Apple, Spotify, etc.

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With YouTube, they won't do that.

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Instead, you have to use the manual refresh option on YouTube's Creator Studio.

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It changes the current episode on YouTube into private

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and replaces it with a new version.

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So any analytics for that previous version won't be counted with the new one.

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However, perhaps one of the biggest issues,

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and certainly for podcasters that run a lot of ads on a show,

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is because YouTube has its own monetization option,

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you can't have ads in your podcast audio.

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So if you use an ad marketplace and they automatically insert ads for you, you're not allowed to use them on YouTube.

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Instead you'd have to strip them out before you upload the audio.

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Now you can use host-read ads or sponsor messages,

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but then you do have to mark that as including paid content on YouTube.

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So it's really up to you.

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There's the potential for more listeners that you didn't have before,

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but do keep in mind that YouTube tends to give more credence to actual videos on YouTube as opposed to static videos.

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Until the next time, happy podcasting.

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Thanks for listening.

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Until the next time, happy podcasting.

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