The Bill Simmons Podcast Took My Advice

The Podfather pivoted to video episodes, but is that simple tweak enough?

Hello, and welcome to the 11 new subscribers since my last email, Let’s Talk About Kanye. And a very sincere shout-out to those of you who attended the Cramer Comedy Newsletter’s inaugural State of Comedy event in Los Angeles last week. It was a delight getting to meet so many of you in person, and chat in detail after the panel. More in-person events to come!

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Thought I’d share that one of the most popular podcasts in the game, The Bill Simmons Podcast, officially expanded to include video two weeks ago. Here’s a screen recording of the inaugural video episode’s opening, which I think is very telling:

Simmons: This is a big episode for us, because this is our first video episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast on Spotify. Every episode from now on will be a video episode on Spotify ... We are a video podcast from now on.

Simmons continues,

I’ve had this podcast since 2007, so [in] Year 18, it’s basically now, I guess… a TV show. A very low budget TV show as you can see, with my very hastily put together posters behind me.

This was perfectly timed, as it changed one week after my column, Why Your Video Podcast Isn't Going Viral.

But here’s the question I can’t get past:

What’s Added by Watching This Podcast vs. Listening to It?

Here are two screenshots from the rest of the episode, where Bill interviews fellow Ringer podcasters Bryan Curtis and Matt Belloni:

Bill interviewing Bryan Curtis.

Bill interviewing Matt Belloni.

These two shots are essentially what the rest of the episode looks like the whole time.

And has continued to look like over the past week of additional video episodes.

Let’s be blunt: so far, nothing has been added by introducing video to the BS podcast.

The frustrating part is that The Ringer does know how to make great video content.

Their Ringer Movies YouTube channel has the right idea, with dynamic editing, multiple camera angles, and labeled sections on their full-length episodes:

And their new season of Cole Cuchna’s Dissect video podcast (a wonderful series that deep-dives into hip-hop albums) is visually engaging and thoughtfully edited:

But most of their flagship podcasts—The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Ryen Russillo Podcast, The Ringer NBA Show—are still stuck in static, one-shot mode.

And it’s reflected in their view counts.

Their YouTube thumbnails and titles, which should drive 50%+ of the organic traffic to each video, are underwhelming:

The “text hook” in the bottom of these recent Ringer NBA Show thumbnails are constantly covered by YouTube’s video length overlay.

Once again, the text is getting covered by the video length. Lots of abbreviations and shorthand in the titles. Not super clear to a stranger what this video is about.

What’s really going on here? And why is The Ringer pivoting to video so hard lately?

I think I can take a wild gue$$.

YouTube ad revenue is lucrative, especially for longer videos like full podcast episodes.

This makes sense intuitively.

A two-hour long video with 200,000 views, and an Average Percentage Viewed over 50% means ~100K people watched the video for over an hour.

This has substantially more advertiser value than a 10-minute video, because it means YouTube (or Spotify) gets to run 12x as many advertisements to the engaged viewer.

Video also allows for more video advertisements on Spotify, who has signaled with this push that there is more money to be made in selling video ad space vs. audio.

However, this creates a disconnect.

The Ringer is optimizing for ad dollars, but ignoring the viewer experience.

The two metrics to optimize for on YouTube are Average Percentage Viewed (APV) and Impressions Click-through Rate (CTR).

To actually grow on YouTube, they need to rethink their approach.

Here’s how: