▶️ Your YouTube Data, Decoded
This is for podcasters. Not for people who have a YouTube channel they call a podcast.
Data month is coming to a close! Next week, we’ll be taking a break from PMM for the holiday. I need a day to sit back and think, “My god. This is the country I live in.” And I think Shreya deserves a day to sit back and think, “My god. Their country will not stop impacting mine.” Happy halfway through 2025! 🥲🎉
Read to the bottom to see what our upcoming themed month will be, and buckle in for some discussion on what YouTube means for you as a podcaster.
If you only have time for one thing:
If you post to YouTube, go check and see if your host tracks your YouTube data. They probably don’t!
😵💫 Let’s lay some groundwork here
This edition will not be about the merits of video podcasts, how to make your video podcast look good, or how to be successful on YouTube. Those are great goals! I just do not care about them one bit. Sorry! Tink is an audio-first company, and we don’t claim to be experts in video.
Besides . . . you can literally just upload your static cover image with your audio to YouTube. In fact, your host can probably do that automatically. Data has shown that most people do not actually watch video podcasts. They open them, press play, and then have it in a background tab while doing something else. My #1 tip for putting your episodes on YouTube is that something is better than nothing. If you wouldn’t skip making sure your podcast is on Spotify, don’t miss putting it on YouTube.
And for what it’s worth: a YouTube channel that is not connected to RSS or podcatchers whatsoever is not a podcast. It’s a YouTube channel. Having long, unedited conversations does not a podcast make. My god. Words mean things.
‼️Your YouTube data needs a home
If your podcast host can upload directly to YouTube, certainly it collects data on that, right? Nope. Unless you have the fanciest Libsyn plan, I can’t think of any hosts that also track YouTube data. They’re just completely separate platforms with completely separate metrics and tracking methods.
Have you been looking at your podcast stats hoping to see some YouTube views? Sorry, buddy. Instead, go check your YouTube account itself. Be prepared to manually add these numbers to your host stats every time you update them for a pitch deck, for your cast and crew, for sponsors, or even just for yourself.
🔢The data that matters for podcasters
If you’re looking to genuinely gain a following on YouTube as a primary means of your podcast’s visibility, you are going to have to become a YouTuber. YouTube’s algo is always changing, and like most algos, it’s a lovecraftian black box that wants you to be dead and miserable. I mean . . . it wants you to not be able to game the system. Do not fall for anyone who says they’re going to make you into a star if you take their course for just five million dollars ninety-nine. Here’s an almost 2-hour insane-making video on why.
But if you’re just looking for audio metrics, here’s what you should count: overall views and whatever looks impressive. You can find these in your Creator Studio under “Analytics.” Here’s what mine looks like, for reference:
👀Views
Easy peasy. Take your views per however long you want to track that data (monthly checks are wise, for instance), store that number somewhere you keep your data tracking, and just add the number of views to your overall number of listens during that time.
😍Whatever else looks good
Here’s some examples of data that might be worth tracking, especially if 1. They look good and 2. You’re talking with sponsors, networks, or any other corporate audiences who don't spend their day-to-day lives in media.
Subscribers: Another easy peasy one. If it’s a good number (I wouldn’t call out anything less than 7k subscribers, honestly) you can just highlight it in a deck.
Views for specific episodes: If you have a single episode that happens to get huge, highlight that. If it gets BIG big, that’s something worth its own slide on a deck.
Watch time from subscribers: This is how long your subscribers by overall audience percentage have watched your channel. This metric shows how dedicated your fans are, versus just one-off videos.
Typical views: This is the YouTube equivalent of checking your average podcast listens at 30 days. YouTube calculates this as an average based on 28 days.
Audience demographics: Most podcast hosts don’t give you audience bio demo details unless you’ve got a fancy plan. YouTube will just give those to you because they own all of our data forever!
This is just the tip of the iceberg; YouTube collects so much information that it really comes down to telling a story. What does this data say about your podcast and your audience? How does this data reflect a narrative of your podcasting career since you started uploading?
Collect data, turn it into some graphs, and think of those graphs almost like a story plot line.
What is the data telling you? Choose the most powerful story, always.
✨ More Magic
Hi hi hi hi hi Atypical Artists is CASTING FOR A NEW AUDIO DRAMA. This production house behind shows like The Bright Sessions, In Strange Woods, Rebel Robin (an official Stranger Things audio drama) is famously not just made up incredibly talented artists, but some of the kindest and most thoughtful creators in the space. Go audition!
We love this so much: podcaster Danny Brown of Five Random Questions and more wrote us to say that he’s been using the Tink Swap Database and it’s been going great!:
“Here's what I've done so far:
Promo swap with the History I'd Like to F*ck podcast, as well as having host Dawn Brodey on as a guest (she was a hoot!). Dawn reached out after seeing me on the database, and her link in my show notes saw 213 clicks from the one month promo.
Host read promo for Tink's Feed the Queue podcast, with the link in my show notes seeing 120 clicks from the one month promo.
Guest exchange with the Make Me a Nerd podcast. Host Mandy Kaplan reached out to me from my listing on Tink's database and we've since been on each other's podcast. Mandy's episode on 5RQs went out today: https://fiverandomquestions.com/mandy”
GO DANNY GO! 🎉🎉🎉
🎧 From the Desk of Tink
This first episode of Crime Adjacent sets the tone and begins the world building for this immersive, never-ending podcast riddled with serial killers and danger. It looks like a true crime podcast. It sounds just like one. It apparently has 7 seasons and millions of fans, and yet, it begins to blur the edges of reality itself and makes the true crime genre a character itself. If you liked the way Limetown straddled fiction and non-fiction, this show leans even further into that unsettling middle ground.
That’s it for Data Month! July’s theme will be New Listener Month! 🆕👶🏻
— Wil 🦇