YouTube Quietly Gives Creators a Real A/B Testing Tool
YouTube’s A/B testing tools are getting a real expansion right now, and it matters if you care about click-through and retention. A/B testing on YouTube isn’t totally new, but what’s new is the broader rollout of testing beyond thumbnails, especially for titles, inside YouTube Studio’s “Test & Compare.” That means you can try multiple title and thumbnail options on the same video and let real audience behaviour pick the winner. For creators, it’s a shift from guessing to learning fast, using YouTube’s own traffic instead of third-party hacks. Descript has a pretty good blog explaining how to use this.
Golden Globes
Amy Poehler’s Good Hang won Best Podcast at the Golden Globes Sunday night. Predictably there’s a little controversy with some suggesting the awards don’t understand the industry.
Nikki Glaser hosted the Globes and ran a comedy bit making fun of podcasts.
The Globes is only going to focus on the gigantic network shows with gobs of money. It’s not intended to be a “representation” of the podcast industry. But having a category for podcasts DOES result in some Monday morning post Globes watercooler talk about podcasts. Overall… it’s cool to have a category for podcasts at the Globes.
Featured Insight
PodSEO has released analysis of what Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini recommend when people look for podcasts. Bottom line? They use listicles for recommendations, not podcast charts or listening platforms.
Spotify is Expanding Video Monetization
Spotify is lowering the barrier to entry for its Partner Program, allowing creators with just 1,000 listeners to start earning. The biggest shift comes in April with the launch of dynamically inserted video sponsorships, a tool designed to let you swap or update ads without re-uploading your entire video. This move puts Spotify in direct competition with YouTube, which announced a similar feature last year but has been much slower to roll it out. Most importantly, thanks to a new Distribution API, you can soon access these video monetization tools while staying with your current podcast host (like RSS.com or Buzzsprout).
Does Adding Video Make Your Podcast More Successful?
The answer to this is complicated. I recently sat down with of The Podcast Marketing Academy to dig into new data he’s uncovered on this.
Obviously Spotify is all-in encouraging podcasters to upload video rather than audio for their podcast episodes. In my view it makes sense. Video tends to draw more people… just not for long periods of time on any one video. That is, you’ll get more eyeballs than earballs on an episode, but they don’t listen/watch nearly as long in video form. So your hours consumed tends to be lower despite having gotten in front of more people.
It’s a classic - do you want wider reach or deeper engagement?
But for Spotify, it’s about wider. Advertisers want wider. But that may not necessarily be better for YOUR podcast. You might want deeper.
Jeremy is one of THE leading researchers in the podcast industry. Just click the thumbnail below to watch the video.
