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It’s widely accepted that video is the key to podcast discovery: you take the best bits from your show, hoping that one of them will go viral on TikTok every now and then, and then the wider (and younger) audience becomes your new audience. Uncah jamz is the perfect example, and it’s brought a new wave of attention call her daddy. But even podcasters who have cracked the TikTok code have found that the relationship between engagement on the app and actual listening is tenuous at best.
This question may quickly become moot. Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives appeared to suddenly pass a bill that would force Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok or otherwise ban it from operating in the United States. If it passes the Senate (and that’s a big “if”), the social media landscape in this country will change—the podcast landscape won’t.
Larger media outlets have embraced TikTok as part of a multi-pronged strategy, but most of the time, it hasn’t been successful. Gen Z prefers celebrity talk shows, e.g. call her daddy and Very good podcast Perform well on the platform, but they are the exception. I’ve heard that in internal discussions at some of the larger audio companies, the prospect of a TikTok ban and its impact on marketing strategies has been barely mentioned.
National Public Radio planet money is one of the few public radio programs popular on TikTok. A quirky commentary video starring Courtney Theophin and Jack Corbett, planet money TikTok has 785,000 followers, 325,000 more than the main NPR account.
“Interestingly, we do find that people learn about the podcast because of TikTok (and vice versa) based on emails/comments/surveys/etc.,” planet money Executive producer Alex Goldmark told hot pods in an email. “It’s difficult to quantify or measure which downloads were driven by any given TikTok post.”
Even after working hard to build a following on the platform, Goldmark knew better than to rely on it. “We adapted to TikTok. Jake and Courtney did a great job matching the style and tone of the audience,” he said. “We’ll adapt to whatever comes next. We’ve had a great time since leaving Twitter. We never thought we should rely on any platform to stay the same.”
Gary Arndt, an independent podcaster who hosts top history shows everywhere every day, has managed to educate some of his explainers on topics such as the Little Ice Age and the development of Route 66, as touched upon by the TikTok algorithm. But through his link tracker, he could see that few viewers were actually willing to click away from the platform to listen to the show.
“A lot of podcasters seem to think there’s nothing they can do, or they just share things on social media. That doesn’t work.”
“Even if a video gets tens of thousands of views, I’m lucky if I get more than single digits in a day,” he said. “The truth is, most social media apps don’t want people to leave their environment. They want to keep them there.”
To him, it doesn’t compare to traditional marketing, like buying promos for similar shows or buying ads on podcast apps like Overcast and Castbox. The purchased media seems to be working – Arndt says he gets about 1.5 million downloads each month.
“Even though it’s an independent podcast, it’s still media property,” he told hot pods. “Yet a lot of podcasters seem to think there’s nothing they can do, or they just share things on social media. That doesn’t work.”
But in some cases, TikTok can work.Christina Lumager, true crime host thriller story and Latin American History Podcast Unknown history, has amassed 215,000 followers on TikTok and occasionally posts more than 1 million views. Although her downloads are relatively small – about 2,000 a week – Lumager said viral videos can temporarily triple her audience.
Lumag may have an advantage for a few reasons. Her demographic is predominantly young – she said most are between 24 and 30 years old. She also successfully adapted to TikTok’s preferred explainer style using a green screen. Even if TikTok doesn’t grow her audience in a consistent way, it’s a key part of her distribution.
“I hear people all the time saying TikTok doesn’t convert into listeners,” Lumage said. “For me it definitely is. I get I don’t know how many messages saying, ‘I found you on Tik Tok and I love it,’ so, yeah, the loss of discoverability and engagement is going to be huge .”
Lumage joined other TikTok users in opposing the ban as the Senate considers how to advance the bill. She is reposting calls-to-action on the app and sending emails to officials (“Not making phone calls because I don’t like talking on the phone”).
The most common thing I hear from podcasters is “let’s just go to Instagram.” But for Lumag, it wasn’t a sufficient replacement. She said that even though Reels has a similar format, it prioritizes aesthetically pleasing content.
“TikTok is more casual. I can just use a green screen and I don’t need to look great in the video, and that’s fine,” she said. “Podcasters that do well on Instagram have professional videos and really good cameras. You can tell they have a team.”
Even Arndt, who has 180,000 Instagram followers as a travel photographer, says Instagram is a failure for podcasts. “Somehow the video content out there performed worse,” he said. He’s not a fan of TikTok, but “it’s honestly one of the best.”