Podscribe: Podcast Video Goes Mainstream.

Podcast video has rapidly moved into the advertising mainstream, with more than four out of five episodic podcast campaigns now including a YouTube simulcast component, according to data from Podscribe. The company’s Q2 Performance Benchmark Report shows 82% of episodic campaigns included YouTube in April, up from 71% a year earlier. At the same time, YouTube accounted for 69% of all impressions delivered by those simulcast campaigns, up from 62% a year earlier, underscoring the platform’s growing role in podcast advertising.

The report suggests the industry has largely settled the question of whether video belongs in podcasting. The bigger challenge now is determining how advertisers should value and measure those impressions.

“Podcasters are putting the ads in YouTube, and advertisers are buying them despite a lack of measurement,” CEO Pete Birsinger said during a webinar presenting the Q2 findings. “There’s a lot of confusion on what can be measured, what shows are accounted for, what shows have opted in, and what it means.”

Spotify is also becoming a bigger part of the video landscape. Podscribe says 30% of the Top 100 podcasts it tracks are now opted into Spotify Video, up from 13% in the previous benchmark report. Among the Top 500 podcasts, adoption has increased to 23% vs. 16% previously. Those figures suggest publishers continue expanding beyond YouTube as additional video distribution options emerge.

While adoption is accelerating, Podscribe says advertisers need to look beyond simple view counts when evaluating video inventory. The report finds that a podcast’s YouTube engagement rate — measured by its comment-to-view ratio — is a strong predictor of advertising performance. Channels with more engaged audiences consistently generated stronger advertiser results than channels with similar audience sizes but lower engagement.

“All else equal, probably the higher comment-to-view ratio show is probably a better bet,” Birsinger said.

The report suggests YouTube engagement may matter more than audience composition when predicting campaign success. Podscribe found simulcast campaigns running on channels with the highest YouTube engagement consistently generated the strongest promo conversion rates, despite often having a smaller percentage of listeners consuming the show through traditional podcast apps. The data suggests highly engaged YouTube communities can help offset video’s lower direct-response performance, making engagement a potentially more valuable buying signal than audience size alone.

Yet Podscribe also found that YouTube impressions continue to underperform traditional podcast audio for direct-response advertisers. Its analysis with Oxford Road shows YouTube views are 18% to 25% less effective at driving purchases than audio downloads.

“As a consumer, I would expect that if I’m watching a podcast, the prime time to convert is while I’m watching the video,” Senior Director of Partnerships Camden Weber said during the webinar. “But what we found was that YouTube was actually generated 30% fewer promo code redemptions and post-purchase survey results compared to their audio counterpart impressions.”

Geography appears to be a factor. Podscribe found podcasts whose YouTube subscriber bases are predominantly U.S.-based generate more than twice the conversion rate of shows with largely international audiences.

“We see more than twice the conversion rate, or promo code redemption rate, for pure U.S.-focused subscribers and podcasts compared to the redemption rate for those non-U.S. subscriber shows,” Weber said.

Because many of YouTube’s largest podcast channels have substantial international followings, Podscribe has updated its methodology to account for U.S. vs. non-U.S. audience composition. The updated model also incorporates ad position within the episode, ad length, and is expected to add creative variables such as whether an ad is host-read and whether products appear visually on screen.

“It makes it a little more clear that audio drives some more conversions than the same number of YouTube views,” Birsinger explained.

While YouTube presents modeling challenges, Spotify creates a different problem. The report says baked-in advertising within Spotify Video episodes often cannot be directly measured using the same attribution techniques available for traditional podcast downloads because those impressions cannot be pixel-based.

“If a show decides to distribute its content on Spotify video, none of the baked-in ad content can be measured regardless if somebody on Spotify watches it on audio or video,” Birsinger said. “So in effect, it creates a measurement black hole.”

Podscribe says it can still account for some Spotify listening through publisher integrations and can measure certain dynamically inserted ads, but much of the baked-in inventory still requires modeled estimates.

Birsinger said he expects that to change. “I don’t think it’s an ‘if’ we get baked-in measurement for Spotify video,” he said. “I think it’s a ‘when’ at this stage.”

Looking ahead, Podscribe also expects Apple’s new HLS-based video podcast support to avoid many of the attribution challenges currently associated with Spotify because Apple video should be measurable using many of the same techniques already employed for podcast audio.

Podscribe will present findings from the forthcoming Q3 PPB in a webinar Wednesday, Aug. 26. Find details HERE.