Thread by @DannyBrownCA

Lots of discussion on the recent @forpodcasters update to allow video podcasts for all podcasters, regardless of who they host with.

The main concern is around whether the audio version is now pulled from the video, and how that impacts the analytics at host-level. 1/

It's a valid concern. After all, if you're working with sponsors/advertisers, you want to have the most accurate analytics.

And even if you're not working with sponsors, you just want to be able to log into your hosting platform and see all your analytics for your episodes. 2/

So, if a listener on the Spotify app watches the video instead, that won't pull back to your host. Nothing new there, it's much like YouTube and how the analytics for your show, if you add by RSS, won't appear in your host's dashboard. 3/

But it's when they listen to the audio version (because they're not on a wi-fi connection to watch the video) that there seem to be issues, and whether that listen will be pushed back to your hosting platform analytics.

A few conversations/concerns online about this. 4/

As an example, if the audio is being pulled from the video and not your RSS feed, should you add video to your show at all, because that's going to cost you listeners.

In which case, should you create a separate, video-only account on Spotify and add your videos directly? 5/

Yep, that would work, but then I don't feel that "solves" the concerns.

1. Two listings for your show = possible confusion
2. You now have twice the work to publish
3. If listeners prefer video, they move to the new feed, removing listeners from the original RSS feed anyway. 6/

Then you have to log in to that new video-only account if you want to see your analytics, so you're back to square one where you have to log in somewhere else to get analytics for the video version.

So you may as well just add video to the existing account. 7/

Is it a pain to have to log in to multiple dashboards to collate date? Sure, it'd be much easier if you could get everything under one roof. But that doesn't happen as it stands already. 8/

Want demographics like gender, age, etc? You need to log in to @forpodcasters and view audience info there. Listener drop off? We offer that at Captivate via our web player, but generally you need to log in to @ApplePodcasts and Spotify for that. 9/

So we're already used to logging in to multiple dashboards to get the full picture of our podcast audience, which we then collate & send to sponsors.

Ideally, Spotify will send the data back to hosts when the audio version of a video is played. Maybe they do - still testing. 10/

Or, bigger platforms like Apple and Spotify support the podcast:alternateEnclosure tag, so they can identify different versions in the feed and play the preferred option, which would make it easier to separate analytics (Captivate supports this tag). 11/

But even if they don't, it's not the end of the world. Our listeners (or viewers) dictate where and how they prefer to consume content. Our job is to create awesome content that they want to consume, and make it easy to do so. 12/

If that means video on Spotify, and I need to "take a hit" on my RSS analytics but still get a view/listen tracked elsewhere and I need to log in to that portal for that data? It's a small(ish) price to pay to meet my listeners where they are so they stick around. ☺️ /13