Video podcast vs audio podcast

Akshay Datt

Founder of Unnati and host of Founder Thesis, a long-form interview podcast with company founders. Over 400 episodes since 2020.

Record the video. Half of weekly podcast listeners now prefer a show they can watch, and almost every B2B podcast still publishing already puts its full episodes on YouTube. What video does not do is bring an audience. A B2B show owned by a company draws a few hundred views an episode there, and a clip cut from an episode draws no more than the episode did.

A video podcast is a podcast recorded on camera and published as video, on YouTube or Spotify, alongside the audio feed. The audio feed does not go away. The shows that last publish both, and the decision worth making is not which format to choose but what to expect from the second one.

Should a podcast be video or audio?

Both, with audio as the product and video as the distribution. The listeners have already decided: half of them prefer a podcast they can actively watch, up from under a third four years ago, and YouTube is now the app more of them use than any other. Yet nine in ten still say they listen. The medium did not switch from ears to eyes. It added a screen, and the screen is where new listeners find the show.

An audio-only show in 2026 is absent from the platform more of its potential audience opens first than any other. That is the case for video, and it is the whole case. Video does not make the episodes better, and for a business show it does not, on its own, make anyone watch.

Spotify carries video too. It lists close to half a million video shows, and more than 500 million of its users have played one, so the same recording covers both platforms that matter.

How many views does a B2B podcast get on YouTube?

About 500 an episode, for a show that exists to market something else. The handful of business podcasts that are themselves the business get between 18,000 and 60,000. There is almost nothing in between.

Disclosure: Founder Thesis is produced by Unnati, the studio that publishes this blog, and is hosted by the author of this article.

The five at the top are companies whose product is the podcast. Colossus, Lenny Rachitsky, Acquired, David Senra and Harry Stebbings sell the show itself, through sponsorship, subscriptions or the funds it feeds, and the video audience is their business. Below them the drop is a cliff, not a slope. HubSpot’s Marketing Against The Grain, the sixth show, gets less than a quarter of the views The Twenty Minute VC gets. The shows owned by software companies, media businesses and individual operators, the ones a marketer would be commissioning, sit between 30 and 800 views an episode.

That is not a failure of those shows. Attributed has published weekly for close to four years and The Transaction is one of the best company-owned B2B podcasts running. It is what a B2B video podcast looks like on YouTube: a presence, not an audience. The audience is in the audio feed, where a niche show reaches the few thousand people who buy the product. Plan the video for the people who arrive through search and the guest’s own network, and measure it against a few hundred, not against Lenny.

Does a company YouTube channel help a podcast?

No. Subscribers to a company channel are not viewers of its podcast. TechCrunch’s channel has 675,000 subscribers, and Equity, the podcast it publishes there twice a week, draws about 800 views an episode, fewer than Topline draws from a channel with under a thousand subscribers. Marketing Against The Grain has 98,000 subscribers and 4,200 views. Dreamdata’s channel has 894 and Attributed gets 31.

The ratio runs from one view per thousand subscribers to seven in ten, and the show’s own numbers never follow the channel’s. A company channel’s subscribers signed up for product demos, event keynotes and launch videos, and an hour-long conversation with a guest is not what they subscribed for. The podcast needs its own channel, where the subscriber count starts at zero and means something.

Do podcast clips get more views than full episodes?

No. On four channels in five, the Shorts cut from a show draw fewer views than the full episodes they were cut from. The clip is a trailer, and a trailer for a show with 500 viewers reaches about 500 people.

Acquired is the exception that shows what the exception needs. Its Shorts draw 93,500 views against 56,500 for the episodes, and Acquired is a show about famous companies with a host pair that has spent a decade becoming recognisable. A clip travels when the subject or the face is already known. Cut from a conversation between two people the viewer has not heard of, it lands in front of the people who already follow the show, and often fewer. The clips are worth making for the guest, who will post them, and for the sales team, who will send them. They are not a growth plan.

Does every episode need to be on YouTube?

No, and several good shows do not put every one there. Most upload every episode. 30 Minutes to President’s Club and Topline put up about half of theirs, Sharp Tech one in four, and Breaking B2B uploaded none of last month’s three. The Marketing Millennials goes the other way and publishes more to YouTube than to its feed.

Selective upload is a sound choice when a guest declines the camera, when an episode is a recorded call rather than a set, or when the video edit would cost more than the views justify. The audio feed is the show of record. YouTube is the shopfront, and a shopfront does not have to stock everything.

What to decide before recording video

1. What the video is for. Presence on the platform half the audience prefers, a clip for the guest, a link for sales. If the answer is “growth”, expect a few hundred views an episode and plan accordingly.
2. Whether the guest is on camera. The ask changes. A senior guest who would give an hour of audio may not give an hour on video, and the guest ask should say which it is before they accept.
3. The channel. The show’s own, not the company’s. Subscribers to a product channel do not watch podcasts.
4. The benchmark. Write it down before launch: a few hundred views an episode is normal for a company show. A number set in advance survives month four; a number nobody set gets the show cancelled for missing it.
5. The recording setup. Video changes what the remote recording has to capture and what equipment sits in the room, and both are decided once, before episode one.

Frequently asked questions