Podcasting on YouTube: The Hows, Whys, and Huhs?!

I've been waiting over a year for this: you can now import an existing RSS feed as a podcast to YouTube! This means that YouTube is essentially available as a podcast directory and anyone with an existing audio-only podcast can take advantage of everything it has to offer.

But of course as the monkey paw curls, it's not perfect. There are definitely some issues and caveats to  be aware of, especially if you want to incorporate a podcast into an existing channel, so let's cover it all from start to finish!

🎙This week's  mic:
•Earthworks ETHOS
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•The ETHOS was running through the Rodecaster Pro II with  my custom SM7B preset.

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S11E9 | Series Episode 163

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Podcast Artwork by Kevin Ramirez
Original theme music written by Patrick Boberg and performed by Mike Alvarez

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hello and welcome. My name is Tom. This is the Enthusiasm Project Season 11, episode 9, and it's going to be just fine because today we're talking all about podcasting on YouTube. That's right, you too can podcast on YouTube. And this is something I've been waiting and waiting to dig into. And there's a very specific feature that I've been waiting for before really talking about it, as I've mentioned in a few previous episodes. And I've spent the past week really diving into how YouTube is handling podcasts and how podcasting works on YouTube. And I basically want to share everything I've discovered with you because I think that this is such a relevant and going to be a very popular question that people have as YouTube moves further and further towards embracing podcasting on podcasting terms, on podcasting's own terms, versus like, you know, trying to just you're just uploading YouTube videos that are called podcasts. And I think that's super exciting. So that's what we're talking about today. Uh before that, I can do a very quick equipment rundown because nothing has changed from last week. I'm still on the Earthworks Ethos and it's still on the preset that I use. If you didn't hear before, so now I've turned that off. This is the ethos, uh, this is what it sounds like just running dry into the Rodcaster. It is a condenser microphone. So we've got phantom phantom power turned on, and my gain is set to 29 decibels. And if I turn on the preset that I put together for it, this is what that sounds like, and that's what I've been using and really liking. So I'm just sticking with the old ethos for now. So no changes there in terms of equipment, but big changes in terms of how YouTube is equipped to handle podcasts. That's what you call a smooth transition. Would have been smoother if I didn't point it out. So uh basically the the most exciting thing that happened that made me excited about this is YouTube is now capable of ingesting RSS feeds, which means if you have an existing show, if you have an audio podcast that's been uploaded to a podcast host somewhere, and you have your RSS feed that goes out to all the directories, you can now take that and put that feed into YouTube, and YouTube will create videos for each of your episodes, even if it's an audio-only podcast. It will just use your album artwork as the visual and it will just play the audio. It will import uh new episodes every time they're uploaded. It will update them. So if you go to, you know, I use Buzz Sprout, for example. If I go to Buzz Sprout and I change an episode title or a description or something, YouTube will update that through the RSS feed, which is awesome. And that's really what I've been waiting for. Because up until now, like a year ago, when YouTube said, Hey, yeah, you can do podcasts on YouTube, it was kind of like a little like podcast to me was in quotes because what does that really mean? Like people have been uploading video podcasts and long videos on YouTube for a long time. But when does a video become a podcast? When does it not? You know, that's kind of always been a gray area. And in the case of YouTube, they basically just meant you could put videos in a playlist, mark that playlist as a podcast, and now it's a podcast. And I think the biggest benefit there is that it would show up in YouTube music, but otherwise you kind of just made a playlist of videos. Like that was really what they did. They sort of like changed an option in playlists, and now that has gotten a lot more um well developed and a lot more further developed. And I've now YouTube is essentially a new podcasting directory with probably more you know reach and recommendation power than any of the other ones, uh maybe even combined, because it's YouTube. And I think that's really exciting. And if you have an existing show, now you can fold that in whether or not you want to add a video component to it. Obviously, having stuff hosted on YouTube makes it make sense if you want to add a video component in the future or combine one. We'll kind of talk about all those different workflows today. I kind of just want to walk you through the whole process, uh, at least as it stands now. I'm sure this is something YouTube is going to be working on and developing a lot. So, you know, if you're listening to this a year or two after it's updated, some of the things I'm talking about might not make sense, or hopefully they've fixed. The uh the summary, the spoiler I have found is essentially if you're uploading, if you want to create a new channel for your podcast, this is a very simple thing and it works great. If you want to incorporate a podcast, an existing podcast, to an existing channel, you're gonna have some problems. And some of those are just not fixable yet, unfortunately. But I feel like the solutions would be relatively simple. So that's what we're gonna be discussing, and we'll kind of go through this the nuts and bolts process of it, and then kind of the more of the nuances of like should you or when should you start? When would it make sense to start a second channel or not? So uh diving in. The first thing you would need in order to do this is uh this is for people who have existing podcasts. So you have an RSS feed for a podcast, doesn't matter where it's hosted, Spotify, BuzzSprout, other ones that I can't think of right now, whatever. You got your RSS feed for your podcast. Maybe you've been doing it for 10 years, you're in all the other directories. All you need to do is go into YouTube Studio. So on your existing channel or a brand new channel, go into YouTube Studio and click create in the upper right, and there's a thing that says new podcast. And this is why I was so excited because there are now three options. You can create a new podcast, which is essentially the thing that we have been taught, like it's a new playlist that just is called a podcast. Okay. So that's like YouTube specific, is that first option there. Uh, you can then set an existing playlist as a podcast. So you can go through any of your existing playlists, mark them as podcasts. Something you might notice is if you already have a bunch of playlists of videos, when YouTube started implementing this last year, it somehow randomly decided to just mark some playlists as podcasts. I don't know if it was like because videos were longer, it had a certain number of videos in it or what. But I know for me, I had like six playlists that were just marked as podcasts, even though they weren't. And initially I was kind of like, well, whatever. If YouTube wants to show these videos in more places like YouTube Music or whatever, that's fine with me. But now that I have the actual podcast on YouTube, I made sure to unmark those. So if you go to the podcast tab on my channel, you you only see this, the Enthusiasm Project, um, at least currently. And that is also a thing. Channels have podcast tabs. So if you go to anybody's channel, their main channel page, you have, you know, home videos, all this stuff, and podcasts is one of them. And you can see uh specific podcasts there. So right now it's the Enthusiasm Project. I've been, I might add uh a podcast with Peter and Tom that I did with Peter Lindgren, but I also like I don't know if Peter wants to put that on his channel and what it would do if we both uploaded, it might break things a little bit. Um, and it'd be interesting to see if like Heather wanted to put the couples table on her channel at some point. Um, and then the ska podcast that I have got folded into the Enthusiasm Project. So those are all there. The third option now. So when you click create new podcasts, you have the option to do a new podcast, set an existing playlist as a podcast, or submit an RSS feed, which is really, really cool. And then YouTube does kind of walk you through it. And basically, what it says uh for each episode in the RSS feed, YouTube will create a static image video and upload it to your channel. By default, any changes you made to an episode's title, description, and published date will be updated on YouTube. You can change this setting in the video details page. So what that means is like I said earlier, when you import your episodes, YouTube is just basing it on the RSS feed. But it does this kind of weird thing where it does create like a video for each episode. So it's not, it really seems like it is importing and re-uploading and re-hosting the thing on YouTube. And I'm sort of unclear about this. So especially in terms of analytics, I honestly don't know if you're somebody who who watches your podcast analytics a lot. I don't know if YouTube's analytics carry over to your podcast hosts. I don't think they they that they do. I think YouTube essentially pulls things in and then creates like new videos for them uh on the YouTube platform. And what you what that means is you can still have it set though that the RSS feed will update those episodes, or you could change it. You can set it so it doesn't do that if you want when YouTube imports an episode and it creates its own little video page for it. You can choose if you want that to be updated or not. Meaning, if you want to change your description or your title to make it more YouTube specific, and you want YouTube, your YouTube version to somehow be different than other platforms, you could do that, and then it won't conflict with the RSS feed as well. Um, and then the next thing that you do after that is you have to enter your RSS feed. This is where uh a thing popped up that I wasn't aware of. So you can go to your podcast host, copy your RSS feed, paste it on this screen. But uh what happens is you need to have an RSS feed that is tied to your YouTube email. So for me, for example, the email address that I use to create my YouTube account is not the email address that is my Buzz Sprout account where the podcast is hosted. So when I pasted the RSS feed, it said that it was invalid or I wasn't authorized to import that, which is which is a good thing. That means you can't just bring in anybody's podcast to your channel, or someone couldn't just bring in your podcast to their channel. And at least on Buzz Sprout, I'm sure the other hosts work the same because they're all pretty uniform, which is really nice. Uh, what I had to do was go into the RSS feed tab on Buzz Sprout, and then there's an option to like set an email for 48 hours. So if I didn't want to change my email address to my YouTube email, which I didn't want to do, I don't want, I don't want my YouTube email to be visible or public anywhere because that's tied to my channel and everything. And I don't want to use it then on something else that's really important, like the podcast. I want those to be separate emails. But what you could do is is enter in this email, and then for 48 hours it would uh register as the quote unquote owner of the podcast. So I had to do that on BuzzSprout. It took about 30 minutes for it to kick in, and then I was able to submit the RSS feed, and YouTube went up, went in and started creating the podcast. Uh, there's 170, 71 episodes that it was importing, and it did 100 episodes in one day, and then it said we'll resume tomorrow. So I guess it if you have a larger library of episodes, it will do 100 episodes per day and import those into the platform, uh, which is cool. And that's that's basically how that works. That's how you import it in. So that's quite simple. And once you're done, you will see that uh you sort of have two options. It does work a lot like a playlist. If you go into your content tab or um your channel tab for podcasts, you will see your podcast there. And you do have different settings. You can do the title, the description, the artwork, which it will just pull from your RSS feed. But if you wanted to change those for YouTube, you could. You can change the visibility of the podcast, and then you can change the visibility of each episode within the podcast. Pretty much the same way playlists work, honestly. Um, and then you you can have default RSS video visibility. So this is where things get a little tricky. What I what I've talked about now is how you import the show to YouTube and all is well. So if you're starting a brand new channel for your podcast and you want to import your stuff, that's it. That's all you need to do, and you're done, pretty much. Um so that there there you go. Now you can go do that. If you want to bring a podcast into an existing channel, which is what I was trying to do, this is where things get a little messy, and there's just a few things to be aware of. So obviously, I want the podcast itself to be visible, right? I want that to be public. I don't want it to be if it's unlisted, that means I could send the link out to someone. If it's private, it basically means only I could see it. But I want it to be public. I want people to be able to find it and listen to it and you know interact with the show, which is pretty important. What I struggled with though was I didn't want suddenly there to be 170 episodes clogging up the subscription feed. So this might be more of an issue when you first import the podcast and suddenly your YouTube channel has a bevy of new content that like you have to figure out what to do with as you go and upload individual episodes in the future. It can be a little less messy, although still kind of messy. So the next option you have is you can set the default visibility for new episodes. So the podcast can be public, but new episodes that are imported could be private, unlisted, or public. And I have mine currently set to unlisted, and the reason for that is because I don't want them to clog up the video page. When everything is imported as private or unlisted, and then you switch it to public, in those video settings, you can uncheck or check the option to publish to your subscription feed. I did not want to publish these episodes to the subscription feed at all because I I don't want I want the podcast to be a thing that's there. I didn't want it to be, for a lot of reasons, I didn't want it to be something that was taking up everybody's feed. So that's okay, fine. I'll make the videos public. I won't publish them to the feed. Good. The next problem I encountered though is that then it takes each episode, and now that becomes like your most recent upload. So in terms of your analytics, which I don't know how that affects channel performance, now it's not looking at my latest actual video, it's looking at podcasts. It's very, very similar to a lot of the problems that popped up when shorts were first introduced. And it's like, oh my God, I would love to make more shorts, but it's messing up my actual channel, and I don't want to do that. And you know, it's been a long time, and YouTube's finally starting to like, oh, shorts are sort of a separate thing than regular videos. Now we're just back to that same problem with podcasting. And so the only way around that is to set the episodes to unlisted, and that kind of does solve the problem because they don't take up space anywhere else, but they're still available when someone finds your actual podcasts, podcast, all the episodes are there. So that's cool. The other downside, if you list them as public, is that on your video page, they will just all be there. And so your your video page gets really messy and really confusing and just wacky, and it's not great. So setting all the videos to unlisted, fix that problem. Uh, you can monetize them if your channel is monetized, you can add monetization. YouTube does ask that you click the sponsorship monetization button, paid promotion button, if you have sponsored segments within episodes and stuff, basically the same way uh you a regular YouTube video would work. And so this kind of works. So, right now, if you go to my channel, you're not gonna see any podcast episodes in the subscription feed. You're not gonna see them on the video page, but if you go to the podcast tab, you will see the podcast is there and all the episodes are there. So great. That sounds great. Still a couple problems though. Uh the first one is all is the the way the episodes are ordered is totally random. When you go into your podcast settings, you have the option to choose how you want your videos to be ordered. Do you want do you want them to be manually sorted? Do you want them to be published, you know, by the newest episode? Like all these things. From what I have found, it kind of doesn't make a difference. Like whatever I select, uh, it's just completely random order of episodes. And that's sort of a bummer because I would like the newest episode to be the one that's there and then, or that's there first, I should say, and then you know, it goes in order. And sometimes when I open up the podcast, it looks that way, and other times it doesn't. I don't know. I don't know. Uh, but the player looks great. Like when you play an episode, the album artwork or the podcast artwork looks great. If you want, you can go in and uh upload an individual thumbnail for each episode, but just your standard podcast artwork actually looks great, both on YouTube and in YouTube music. And so that works well, and you can, you know, people can play play every episode uh in order, they can shuffle them, they can loop it. So it's it's got a lot, it's a great player for podcasts. The other downside, though, to having everything unlisted is you don't get to take advantage of YouTube's biggest strength or one of their biggest strengths, which is search and recommendations. None of those episodes will show up in search, none of those episodes will show up in people's recommendations. So all of that awesome discoverability for your podcast, you don't get to take advantage of. The only way you can take advantage of that is to set your videos to public and have them clog up your whole channel, which is why if you're creating a separate channel for your podcast, this is not an issue because that's what people would expect. Uh, but if you're trying to incorporate a podcast to an existing channel, that's where you run into some problems. And the the solution to that would actually be quite simple. Um and this could even be something that is on maybe every every video, it doesn't even have to be a podcast thing, is I think YouTube just needs a little box to check in video preferences that says include this video in include this video in channel's video page or something like that. And maybe by default that's turned on, and then if you go uncheck it, you can have a public video that doesn't show up on your videos page, problem solved. And maybe even the podcast, maybe you can even have it just a podcast setting. Um, display videos in this podcast or display podcast episodes on video page, yes or no, done, and that would solve the problem. Hopefully that's something they will do because then I could set all of my podcast episodes to public, or you know, it's not just me, but if you're somebody who has a channel, you want to bring in a podcast, you can set your episodes to public. They're not going to mess up your existing channel, but they're still gonna show up in search results, there's still gonna be things that can be recommended to people. All of that awesome YouTube discoverability is still going to be there, and that would be really, really ideal. So that I mean that that's those those are that's pretty much uh everything I have learned about podcasting on YouTube, and of course, you can monetize your episodes. So this that's everything I was saying, which is crazy. YouTube can import stuff via an RSS fee and then slap their own ads on it, but that means you can monetize your episodes. YouTube monetization is significantly better than pretty much any other platform. So potentially, if your episodes are being hosted on a monetized channel, that means you could earn a bit of extra revenue. For me, I definitely know like, hey, having 170 new pieces of content suddenly on my channel that are monetizable, especially after this whole invalid traffic thing, I wouldn't really mind, you know, that chance to potentially boost a little bit of revenue. If you're someone starting a new channel based around podcasting, the the the and you're trying to get monetized, um, the fact that podcasts tend to be long form means I don't know how if it's gonna be easy to grow your subscriber numbers, but I have a feeling it would be easier to hit your watch time numbers at 4,000 hours, unless they change it for podcasts. Uh, that's gonna be a little bit easier than you know, just a whole bunch of short videos where people need to watch a long time. If you're uploading a bunch of hour, hour and a half long videos, and that's your that's what people are watching. I feel like getting your watch time built up for monetization is going to be quite a bit easier. So while this is all well and good, I think the next question that's gonna pop up, or at least the next question I have, is awesome. This is what I wanted. I wanted to be able to take my existing library and bring it into YouTube, and that's awesome. Even though they're audio-only episodes, it works on YouTube. Now, what if you want to start incorporating a video component to your podcast? What if you do want to take your audio and now make it a video podcast? How can you do that after having done this? And that's where I think things get a little tricky because you could potentially end up with double episodes, right? Like you record your video podcast, you upload it to your channel, you could upload it, you know, add it to the podcast list, even though it's not from the RSS feed, you could add it there. But then when you upload the audio version to the RSS feed, it's going to get pulled into YouTube as well. And it's also kind of weird because Um, unless maybe you dive into some of the settings. YouTube is it will just like if you delete an episode from your podcast, but it's still on the RSS feed. If you delete it from the feed, so if I go to BuzzSprout and I delete an episode, it will remove it from YouTube. If I go to YouTube and I delete an episode and it's still on the RSS feed, YouTube will just re-upload it. So you'll just keep fighting forever in that regard, which is a little weird. So the the thing that I want to figure out over the coming months or coming weeks, I guess, is how to then incorporate a video podcast component. And I think based on the way things work currently, the best way to do that is you have your audio RSS feed imported, you get to the point where you want to start producing video episodes, and then you stop importing, you set the podcast to not automatically import RSS feed stuff anymore, and then you just add other things to it. So for example, when you go down um in the in the podcast settings, there is a setting very at the bot at the very bottom that says episodes to upload, choose which episodes to upload. Um and you have two options. You can say upload all episodes to the RSS feed or up as upload episodes published since a certain date. Um there isn't the opposite option, upload episodes published before. So you can only do since, not before, uh, which means if you started doing a video podcast on January 1st, you could say upload all episodes before you know January 1st. And then it wouldn't duplicate the video ones, but now it's since, so it might be kind of a weird thing, and you might have to go in and private some stuff that's put in on the RSS feed. It's gonna take a little more curation and not gonna be quite as fully automated as it is if you're just bringing in the audio-only episodes. Again, probably an area where they could polish things up just a little bit. Um, and and hopefully that will make more sense. And again, that would still apply also if you're doing a separate channel for your podcast, because it's you still have that issue of like, well, what do I do with the video file if YouTube's already importing the audio files? So again, parts of the process that can be worked up and you know, and worked out and polished up a little bit. And but overall, that's pretty much how it works. So the next big question to dive into is should this be on a second channel or not? And I don't have an answer for that. The the eternal question on YouTube is do I start a second channel for this or that or whatever? I feel like everyone who's done YouTube has asked themselves that question at some point. Like, should I start a second channel or a third channel or whatever? I can't, I can't say. I can only share my in my insight and my thoughts on this. My initial impulse was that I was going to put my podcast on a second channel, which is something that could still happen on a totally separate channel. I already have a second channel, so this would be a third channel that is just the podcast. And that is the format we've seen for a long time. Like huge creators, you know, and channels have their channel and then they have their podcast channel. And that is, you know, that's probably a popular way of doing it for a reason, but that was also a way of doing it before YouTube was embracing podcasting as fully as they are now. So does that make sense? Does it not make sense? It makes sense from a simplicity of workflow in terms of workflow, and it makes sense in terms of not clogging up your channel with other things that might be semi-unrelated. It depends, of course, on what your podcast is, what your channel is, how close the overlap is between topics, you know, all those kinds of things. Um, what I have found, surprisingly enough, having had this podcast now for almost five years, having the link in every video, talking about it, sharing it, uh, there are still a ton of people every time I make a video where I talk about my podcast, or I recently did my podcast workflow video, so many people are like, I had no idea you had a podcast. Oh, I never listened before, I'll listen now. It's like, okay. So having the podcast on the channel with everything else makes it a lot more visible. And I've already, just in the time that I've had the podcast there, and it's very like low-key, all the videos are unlisted state. I've had people say, like, oh, I really enjoy this. It's cool to like get to know you on a more personal level. To me, that's kind of an important thing, is I do like that I can have all my videos, and this podcast is a lot more, you know, it's it's a lot less polished, it's a lot more personal. It goes over five years. We've had all kinds of different topics on here. I kind of like that there is a very easy way for someone to find that. You would think that just having, oh, here's my podcast channel, or here's my link to my podcast would solve that problem. But I'm discovering that there, that's still a huge hurdle. Getting someone to go to a new channel, getting someone to go to a new link, especially if, in like my case, the podcast isn't just your name, which most people's podcasts have a name, even if their YouTube channels are their personal name. The podcast has a different name. And, you know, and that sort of becomes unclear. Whereas now you're on my channel, you see my videos, you see my podcast, it's all in one place. It immediately is like, oh, here's another thing. This person whose stuff I'm watching right now, here's another thing that they make. And it seems like people are more willing to like dive in and engage with that and give it a try than they are when you ask them to go to a separate channel or a separate platform to listen. That surprises me. This is all very anecdotal, it's just my individual experience. But for me, that makes me want to keep the podcast on the main channel for that specific thing right there. Like it is that's why I want to be able to fold it in without disrupting everything else. And I think, you know, YouTube does, YouTube makes mistakes for sure, but overall they do a lot of really good things and they add a lot of really cool stuff. But one thing that's always rough is they add new features, and it almost seems like they don't consider what the new features will do for people with existing channels. Because when you have a channel, whether or not it's your full-time, part-time thing, messing it up is a huge fear. And so when it's like, oh, can I try, you know, can I try live streaming? Can I try YouTube Shorts? Can I try podcasting? Whatever cool stuff that they incorporate that you want to play with, it's kind of scary to go, like, well, is this gonna totally mess up my channel? Is this gonna tank my channel? You know, like if I post these podcast episodes public, and now my channel is counting those as my most recent releases and they're performing terribly compared to regular videos, is that going to hurt my channel? Like, is YouTube going to think, oh, this person, this channel is now producing videos that nobody's interested in. Let's not recommend that to anyone, even though it's like, well, it's just a different type of thing. So I think having in all having those kinds of options to accommodate different needs, workflows, purposes, wherever people are with their channels is really important to encourage people to use these new features. And I don't think that the answer should be every time YouTube releases a new feature, you start a new channel. So you've got your main channel, your live streaming channel, your shorts channel, your podcast channel, your second personal channel. Like, I understand the need for all that, but you know, it it'd be kind of nice if everything can be folded into one big thing. And I have seen more than I expected the the benefit and the willingness of people when they're just already in one place with all your stuff to engage with all your stuff rather than trying to seek it out in all of these other different places. I really do wish there was a clear answer to go like, yes, you should start a new channel, or no, you shouldn't, or you should if. But it it's one of the biggest lessons I've learned this year when it comes to YouTube is that it's very important to try new things and experiment, but also it's even more important to really spend some time reflecting and introspecting on what works best for you specifically, which likely won't be exactly what works for somebody else. And so I think there are some people where starting a new channel for their podcast is absolutely the right thing to do. I think there are other people where folding it into an existing channel is absolutely the right thing to do, and it it totally just depends. And I'm still figuring this out. I I don't 100% know that I won't end up putting the podcast on a second channel, but I would really prefer not to. And I think there are a lot of cases where it totally makes sense to have that second channel for a podcast. It is, you know, it is clean, neat, easy to understand in terms of your analytics. Boom, it's all there. Although when you upload a podcast to your existing YouTube channel, you do get a separate analytics tab just for that specific podcast, which is pretty cool. So you can kind of see, you know, what hey, look, I'm looking right now. My podcast, not to brag, but it's earned nine cents. Yeah, that's nonsense. That's nine cents. 170 episodes, nine cents, full-time podcaster. Uh, but you know, if you wanted to have a channel where it's all everything podcast related is over here, if you're somebody where you have your own channel here, but you do a podcast with other people, you know, and you want to have multiple people have access to the podcast channel, but maybe you don't want to give them access to your channel, all those kinds of situations are things where it would make sense to have a separate channel for your podcast. I think you know, when when I was talking about YouTube making it less terrifying to try new features on existing channels, I think that's it's it's like having all these options is what you want. And the thing with the podcasting stuff that's very interesting to me is it seems like the solution for so many potential issues with incorporating a an existing podcast to an existing channel is to just have the option to not have the videos show up in your video page. Like you to have a public video that doesn't show up as your recent upload and doesn't show up in the video page. That would kind of solve all of the problems, which feels like it's you know, it's a checkbox to add in and we're good, and everything is done. So that's I I really hope that they do that or a version of that. Uh, you know, I'm sure there's more complicated things that I'm not considering when it comes to that on the back side of things, but that really would just kind of fix everything, and then you have all these podcasts taking advantage of YouTube's awesome recommendations and stuff. And yeah, that's I mean, that's that's the that's the long and short of it when it comes to podcasting on YouTube, and also when it comes to second channels, thinking of what you want to grow is important, you know, the same way that that it's hard to push people from your main channel to your podcast, you have that same challenge pushing people from your podcast to your YouTube channel. And say you have a podcast episode that that goes crazy and blows up and becomes really popular. If that were on your main channel, it would be benefiting your main channel, but now it's it might not necessarily. And I say that because I had a video I didn't realize on my second channel that went a bit viral lately, and I didn't know because my second channel is such a personal, just fun, you know, endeavor. I upload videos to it kind of whenever I feel like it. I don't check the analytics, I check in with comments every so often, but there's usually not that many comments on there because it's not a hugely popular channel. Uh, and then I was like, Oh, I'll check in on the channel. And normally, you know, it's like, oh, you've gained four subscribers in the last few days. And it's like, congratulations on you know, 500 new subscribers. And I was like, why? And then it's like, congratulations on earning YouTube partnership eligibility. And like, how and I realized I had a video from a year ago that just it had like 200 views and then suddenly had like was getting like 10 to 15,000 views a day for a while and was heading up towards 100k. So that uh was unexpected. It's cool. And then I dove into the comments, and there's just hundreds of comments and so many blocked comments or you know, spam filtered comments, and it was a little rough because it was also like it was a video, it was a video about an old TV camera. Like, hey, I'm making a video using this old TV camera. That's kind of it. It wasn't a tutorial, it wasn't a review, it was just me having fun with an old camera. But you know, suddenly when that video is getting recommended and now it has lots of views behind it, people are clicking on it. I think they're expecting something a little different, and so a lot of the comments shifted to just telling me what an idiot I am and how I don't know anything, and that was fun. Um, but the thing that's funny about that is it was one of those videos that when I made it last year and it just sat and did nothing for a year, I did have the thought of like, should this go on my main channel? Like, it's very obvious if I'm making a video about my first official hockey game, that goes on the second channel. Like that has nothing to do with my main channel. If I'm doing a video about this old TV camera, hmm, where could that potentially go? And I put it on the second channel specifically for the reason I just mentioned, which was that it it was not it wasn't a review, it wasn't a tutorial, it was sort of just me having fun with something. Not that I wouldn't want that on the main channel, but I just felt like, especially when, you know, a year ago when I'm trying to think of what I want my channel to be, I just felt like that video didn't it just wasn't what people would benefit from on the main channel. So I'll put it on the second channel, and that was fine. The problem is I if if it had been on my main channel, there would have been so much more context and so much more. I really wish I had put that video on my main channel, let's put it that way. And then when that video suddenly took off, there's a lot of other stuff there for people to explore and people to interact with, and and future videos will probably be at least a little more related to them. Because let me tell you, when someone subscribes my channel because they like this video about an old TV camera, and then I upload a video about getting my goalie mask painted, they're probably not gonna be super interested in that. And so now this video that went popular could potentially end up hurting the channel, whereas it would have really, really helped the main channel, and you know, the second channel, again, it's not something I care about growing, it's a it's just for fun and nothing else. So that's fine if it like, you know, subscribers go down or whatever, it's not a big deal. But it would be, it would have genuinely been a beneficial thing to have on the main channel and it wasn't there. And so that's that's kind of the risk that you run when you separate stuff into different channels, is if something does pop and something clicks in a certain way, is the thing that it's helping to grow the thing that you want to grow? And sometimes it seems obvious that the answer is yes, but if you really get into it, like when my second channel, and there's been a couple other videos over the last couple of years that have like gotten a bit more popular on that channel, I have the exact opposite reaction as I do on my main channel. If a video does well on the main channel, of course I'm excited. Yay, I want the channel to do well, the video too well, the channel to grow, everything's great. On the second channel, I get really nervous because it's like, oh no, I don't want them to think this is a whatever kind of channel. It's not a hockey channel, it's not a 3D printing channel, it's not a camera channel, it's it's a me channel. And uh now I'm scared this video is is doing well, and it's people are signing up to the channel and they're not gonna like now. I feel pressure of like satisfying an audience when the channel's not that's not what that channel is for. And so it's making me a little more aware of what to put on the main channel and whatnot. And essentially, my my current feeling is that anything related, even tangentially, to cameras and audio video production goes on the main channel, even if it's not like review tutorial or something that has a clear benefit to someone, because that would just be more beneficial in every way to be over there. And things that clearly don't fall into that category go on the second channel. So um, all that to say, that's the kind of thing that can happen when you when you have more than one channel. So if your podcast is on a second channel, you have an episode that does really well, or the podcast itself starts doing really well, and now you're like, crap, like I wish all these people would go over to my other channel. Obviously, it's not an issue if you don't have a uh a quote unquote main channel, but something to consider before just jumping in and making a brand new channel for a podcast, although that will make the workflow and the organization and that whole thing much, much simpler. So that I think is everything that there is to know about YouTube podcasting currently, and I'm sure that it will change, and I'm excited to hear how it changes. If I'd totally be excited to know any other questions or experiences that anyone listening to this might have. Um, because you know, this is this is everything I know after like watching it since they announced it, but really diving into it and trying to bring it into my channel for the past week. So um definitely by no means an expert. I'm just sort of going like, hey, I'm interested in this. This is what happened to me. What happened to you? That kind of a thing. So that is podcasting on YouTube. Since we got a little bit of time left, uh, there's a little bit of a gear thing that I was thinking of diving into, and this is just for fun. So this is, you know, we are leaving the podcasting YouTube conversation right now. Um I've been using the same equipment for the past couple weeks, the Roadcaster and the Ethos, because it's simple and because it's easy. But something else that I've been trying to do is I have uh, if you go back and you watch a bunch of my old videos in the background, you'll notice that on my desk, like my studio was set up differently, but on the desk, there's a bunch of like little synthesizers and keyboards and things like that. And as I've just needed more space, those have kind of just been sitting in a closet for a while. But I've been digging them out lately and wanting to reset them up. Um, and it's still God, it's just it's so much cables, it's just so it's such a mess, but it's so fun, you know, to play with them. So I'm trying to play around. And a really cool thing is I got really into the little keyboards, and what I was trying to do was make a Dawless uh workstation, which basically means I can record and loop and layer music without needing a computer, without needing a DAW on a computer. And that's that's I started that in like 2014-ish, prior to YouTube. What's cool now though is I have all this other audio gear that I've gotten from you, you know, I have cool microphones, lots of cables. I have things like the Rodecaster Duo and the Macy DLZ. So now instead of having to run things into like a zoom H4N to record, I have the Mac E DLZ, which is like this amazing multi-track recorder. Now instead of needing a weird little tiny mixer to sort of bring in my synthesizers before I run them out into some effects, I can use the Rodcaster Duo. Like I got all these cool, these cool little things, and it's been a lot of fun, even though I'm not 100% sure that I'm gonna leave this stuff set up. I do like it in the background, so in terms of just set design, having the the stuff and the flashing lights and everything, looks pretty sweet. And I have some really, really cool like effects boxes and things that I've wanted to figure out how to work with a roadcaster, uh, which I still don't quite know how to do without totally degrading the audio quality. So that's something to just consider. But anyway, the reason I bring that up is something I really wanted to do this season was record an episode using the boss gig caster, which I currently don't have anymore because I had to send mine in to get repaired, uh, which is a bummer. And I'm sort of I've talked about the gig caster. I I did the whole episode about podcast mixers and things, but the thing with the gig caster, which is harder to say than you would expect, is it's so good for music, but it's kind of like eh, for everything else. And mine specifically, the problem it had, not a big problem for a podcast recorder, uh, is that it wouldn't record. It wouldn't, no matter what SD card I was using or what version of firmware or resetting it or whatever, it would say that it's recording and like I'd push record and it would it would record and it would everything would be there, and then I go back to listen and it's just a blank audio file, or sometimes even not a fully processed audio file. I haven't heard anybody else have this problem. I couldn't find anything else. I thought it was me, you know, doing something wrong. So that's what I was trying like high capacity, low capacity, fast, slow cards, all this stuff. Could not get it to work. It worked perfectly as an interface, like it totally. You know, I used it, you could use it for streams, I could use it for, you know, what I did mostly was playing guitar and bass through it because it's so good for music and for mixing in like backing tracks, and you can add effects and virtual modeling and stuff, and that's like amp modeling and simulation and everything. It's so good for that. It's absolutely amazing. Um, but that yeah, I could never actually get it to record, which was always a bit of a bummer. And then I did notice, I don't know if this was just a holiday sale thing. Okay, I guess I think it was. This this actually makes me a little happier. Um, the gig caster was on a crazy sale during Black Friday week for like $300 or something. Normally, the the one I have, um, the Gigaster 8 is $700, $800. It's the same price as the Rodecaster Pro 2, $700, which I think is too expensive. And they draw that all the way down to like $300. And I was excited about that, and it's like, wow, dang, if anyone's thinking about this, $700 makes it a tough sale. $300 is a no-brainer, but then it had me worried, like, well, it came out you know, six months ago. I haven't really heard much about it. Is it not doing well? And they're just kind of like clearing it out. Like, is it gonna be discontinued? Had me worried. I couldn't find any anyone else having my issue with um the non-recording thing. Like, I could not find anything on the internet about anybody else having this problem. So fortunately, I don't think that's a widespread thing, and I had to reach out to boss's customer support um to try to do some troubleshooting, and then I just sent it in for repair. So that's why I haven't used it to record, is for a long time I just thought I was messing up, and then finally I really wanted to dig in and figure it out, and then I realized, oh no, it's it's not me, it's the unit. Thankfully, I just assume, of course, it's gotta be my fault. In this case, it wasn't. But the thing that's such a bummer is since I don't have it anymore, I don't have my cool music interface to like play guitar and bass with. And that's one of the best, that's the biggest strength of the gig caster. And so it's been like I found myself not playing guitar and bass as much. And so I was like, gosh, I really, I really want this thing. I have no idea when or if it'll even come back. Um, but I really miss that part of it, and I was able to use these sound pads or the smart pads on the gig caster to uh assign effects and stuff, which is really cool. The downside being is you're playing and playing your guitar, you're playing your bass, and then you suddenly want to add an effect or you know, switch from clean to distorted or add in reverb or whatever it might be. You know, you have to take your hand off the guitar, push the button, and go back, which is why musicians typically use foot pedals because you can play the instrument and then switch stuff with your feet. The gig caster does have an output. I think they do make a foot pedal for it. Um, but I was like, I don't know that I want to like then invest in another piece of gear to use this. And I think the foot switch is like 130 bucks, it's not crazy expensive, but it's also it's not like it's like three buttons, it's not super fully featured. I don't, I don't know. There might be other ones that work with it as well. I just wasn't totally sold on the idea of it. And I thought, like, wait a minute, if the thing I'm missing the most is the music processing ability, what about all of those cool like um you know interface mixer digital workstation things that started popping up like 20 plus years ago? And I remember when I was playing guitar and bass as a kid, or in high school, I should say, one of my friends got like a I think it was, it might have been a Roland or it was a line six little foot switch. It was like, you know, a little thing that goes on the floor. It had like five foot switches on it and like a built-in expression pedal, and then you can go through and dial in different sounds and stuff. It's like that seemed kind of cool. And then I remember there were like the line six pods back in the you know the later 2000s where there are these little things that they're little interfaces that you could run into, run your instrument into, run into your computer, and then they could model you could get crazy amp sounds and make it sound like you know you're playing through a giant stack of amplifiers or cabinets when you're just in this little thing with your headphones, which is really, really cool. And so for home recording, it was kind of insane. And I was thinking, like, wait, that was 15, 20 years ago. That stuff has to have gotten better since then, right? And oh boy, has it. So what I decided to do was just look into getting a dedicated music like digital workstation, and I ended up getting a line six pod go, is what it's called. So it's not something you would use for podcasting or anything, but it's like um it's a floor foot switch that has eight buttons that you can press plus a built-in expression pedal, which could be volume or wall or whatever. Um, and then a pretty decent user interface and a really nice app. So you can have all these, it has like 128 pre presets built in that you can adjust, and then 128 like blank spots where you can just make stuff, and it works for guitar and bass, and it's super nice and it sounds amazing. Like you can dial in any sound, you can add in all these effects. I cannot tell you how much fun this thing has been, and it's it's um, you know, it's a foot switch thing, so it's now you can play the instrument, not take your hands off the instrument, switch the buttons, do the things, and it's so funny because as a kid, I remember when my friend had one of these, I thought it was fun, but I was like, I'll never be interested in something like that because I was so into I need my fender amp with spring reverb, and I need effects pedals for everything. If I want delay, I need a delay pedal. If I want whatever, everything needed its own individual pedal that was designed specifically for that kind of effect, and you know, getting all that stuff wired out was fun at the time. And now it's like there's nothing I want less than I tried even like a year ago to rebuild like a big pedal board for my guitar and my bass to make everything nice and organized, and you're like running the power supplies and you're running the different effects and you're running all the patch cables, and then especially if you're someone like me who switches between guitar and bass, they're not always the same, and so you got to run it through different amps. And then if you want to bring in backing tracks to play along to, or just like a Spotify playlist or something, it isn't super easy, and the sound quality is not always great. So I was like, this thing is just made for all that, it's one little tiny thing. Like, literally, you could run it into an amp or a PA system or a computer as an interface, or you just run into your headphones and be done with it, and that's awesome. They even have a version that's like wireless, so it comes a little wireless thing for your guitar, and then you don't even need a cable. I didn't want to deal with batteries or charging or anything, so I just got the wired version, and it's literally just take your guitar, take your bass, plug it into the unit, plug in your headphones, and you're done. And you can it's like so I don't want to say it's easy. There's a learning curve to figuring it out, but it's pretty easy to figure it out, and you can really dial stuff in. And it's so crazy because when it comes to like the the recording simulation of speakers and cabinets and stuff, you can choose a simulated version of like the type of microphone that would be placed in a guitar cabinet. Because if you're in a recording studio and you're recording guitar or bass, you're you're gonna have you know the bass is running into a head unit that is like processing the sound, and then that's gonna be connected to a speaker or a cabinet, like the amplifier that is then you know projecting the sound. And in the studio, you would take a microphone and you would position that. But as anyone with more knowledge of studio recording than me can tell you, you can't just like plop a microphone in front of a speaker and it'll sound good. The type of microphone you choose, just like with your voice, where and how you position it, like is the microphone directly in front, is it off to the side, is it at a distance? Do you have two microphones? All these different options, you know, coming um coming into play when it comes to recording. And what's really cool is with this, you can literally get into the part where you're modeling the cabinet and you can choose a type of microphone. There's all these like ribbon microphones, dynamic microphones, condenser microphones, you can choose those, and then you can choose where that mic is like positioned virtually. Like there is no microphone, there is no cabinet, but it's just if this microphone, if you took a condenser mic, put it eight inches away from the speaker, and then you know, 30 degrees off to the side, this is what that would sound like. Which is, I mean, it's way more minutiae than I really need to get into, but it's it's it's just crazy how good these have gotten. They were so cheesy and so like, but this is and from the reviews I've seen, it's like these kinds of things people will actually take for gigs and performances and stuff, which I could totally see. It's so much fun. Uh, so that has been like reigniting my excitement of like you know, playing music and stuff because it's fun again, it's easy to bring in. You can either just run it into your computer and and bring in like a you know, play audio from your computer, or super easy to just connect an auxiliary source, like a phone or whatever, and play it from that. And it's you don't need the computer, but you could have it if you want it. Oh, it's just so good. And then it's one of those fun things too, where like people can make their own presets and you can you can share them and bring them in and have all these other effects and things. It's it is awesome. I wanted to share that now because it it's sort of an update to my gig caster saga, but it's also like it's funny that that led to another piece of gear and another appreciation for a different piece of gear. And I know a lot of people listening to this dabble to some degree in music, whether it's a little bit or a lot of it. I know a lot of you do that. So that's what we're talking about today. I really want to go play music now, so I'll probably end the episode and go do that. Uh, thank you so much for listening. I hope this was a helpful look at podcasting on YouTube because it's it's definitely something that's a little confusing and there's a lot of nuance too, especially if you're trying to incorporate an existing podcast into an existing channel. And I'm sure this is going to change. But like I said earlier, too, let me know if you have uh if you have anything to add to that. If you have any questions about it, or if you have any suggestions, or if you have a breakthrough or you can solve a problem that I'm having or whatever, you can always go to Hi, my name is Tom.com and leave a message, or just email me at tom at enthusiasmproject.com. As always, thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. I hope you have a safe, happy, healthy rest of your week. Stay tuned for next week's episode, which is gonna be the season eleven season finale. Have a good week.