I am intrigued by the recent announcement from Spotify that a range of their podcasts from The Ringer (which is owned by Spotify) will be coming to Netflix. In recent years, The Ringer has leant heavily into video for their titles. And now, complete episodes will air exclusively on Netflix – in the US initially. The set of podcasts are:
| Sports | Culture/Lifestyle | True Crime |
| The Bill Simmons Podcast | The Rewatchables | Conspiracy Theories |
| The Zach Lowe Show | The Big Picture | Serial Killers |
| The McShay Show | The Dave Chang Show | |
| Fairway Rollin’ | Recipe Club | |
| The Ringer F1 Show | Dissect | |
| The Ringer Fantasy Football Show | ||
| The Ringer NFL Show | ||
| The Ringer NBA Show | ||
| The Mismatch |
As part of the deal, full episodes will be coming off YouTube. Instead, clips will remain available on the titles’ YouTube channels.
There was a good discussion about all of this on The Town podcast this week, and I want to dig a little further into the reasons why such a deal might have been done.
1. Money
I think it’s pretty clear that revenues are the first thing that drives this. While these titles might do well from an audience perspective on YouTube, my strong suspicion is that the revenues just aren’t strong enough from YouTube video. For many titles it’s likely that there are higher CPMs to be generated from podcast audio compared to YouTube video. In other words, every consumer who bails on the audio on RSS and streams the video on YouTube is actually costing the producer money!
Of course YouTube provides enormous potential reach, so millions of views generating less money per episode than hundreds of thousands of audio streams, might still make financial sense in the overall. But of course, Netflix will be paying per episode as well, so there’s a calculation to be done.
In any case, if you look at some of the titles here, you won’t tend to see millions of views for any of these shows. According to rankings just released by Edison in the US, The Bill Simmons Podcast is the biggest title on this list, at number 36 in the top 50. It seems to do between 50,000 and 100,000 views on average, with some episodes really spiking beyond that. I guess it depends on subject matter and guests. Or look at something like The Rewatchables which explores classic movies. Some titles do quite small numbers, while Star Wars (“A New Hope” as I can’t ever really call it) gets more than half a million.
What this all shows to me is that The Ringer isn’t giving up lots of YouTube revenue here, and they’ll probably still maintain a chunk of that via the clips that they’ll continue to upload to the platform. And this revenue is probably offset by whatever Netflix is paying.
2. Strengthening Spotify’s Video Offering
Episodes of these titles will continue to be made available in full on Spotify and generate what are likely to be smaller revenues there.
I have no real metrics to back this up, but I don’t think that Spotify has yet really hit home with video on the platform. It’s still mobile first (you don’t usually see TV remote controls coming with a Spotify button, but you do regularly see YouTube and Netflix buttons), and I think that most people who installed or paid for Spotify are thinking of it first and foremost as a music platform, with podcasts a secondary reason to have it. On the other hand, video is the only reason to get the YouTube app.
The message that Spotify is sending out is: ‘Here are some popular podcasts that you can only watch on Spotify or via your paid Netflix subscription. Spotify – we also have video!’
Why is Netflix Getting Involved?
This is cheap programming and they’re getting many hours of it. I think of this less about daytime television programming, and more about a replacement for talk radio. This is very much lean back programming, and did I mention it’s cheap?
On The Town, Matt Belloni posited that it might cheapen Netflix. This isn’t top tier programming after all. But I think that ship has long since sailed. Netflix still does produce very expensive programming, but it also produces quite cheap commodity programming. From their perspective, this makes sense.
My only real quibble is that the shows they’ve onboarded here from The Ringer are very US-focused. The sports shows, with the exception of their F1 show, are exclusively about US sports, and while The Rewatchables and their true crime shows have broader international appeal, I’m not sure they’re really targeted at global audiences.
And therein lies a problem with this strategy: podcasts are surprisingly regional. There are barely any US titles in the UK top 25 podcasts, and there are precisely zero UK titles in the US top 50 (not even The Diary of a CEO makes the cut).
Which UK Studios Should Netflix Do A Deal With?
Let’s consider the UK market, and who Netflix might do a deal with here. The obvious candidate would be Goalhanger and their The Rest Is… franchise. They punch much higher on the equivalent Edison UK podcast rankings though, and episodes of The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Football do between 100,000 and 200,000 views per episode on YouTube. But The Rest Is Football and The Rest Is History in particular are likely to well globally which might appeal to Netflix.
So again, the calculation would be how much Goalhanger would be giving up coming off YouTube compared to what they’d be gaining from Netflix. And the difference here is that they’re not owned by Spotify. So would there be a reason for episodes to remain on Spotify? Or might Netflix pay for full episode video exclusivity? The only real question is whether The Rest Is Politics is too close to actual news for Netflix? They probably don’t want another Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, which was as close to Last Week Tonight as they ever went, but ended up with an episode about Saudi Arabia being pulled, while an episode about Indian elections probably didn’t help Netflix’s growth in India either.
The other interesting group to look at might be The Fellas Studios, recently purchased by Global. With titles like Saving Grace and The Fellas, this is a podcast group that has leaned heavily into video. The numbers for views of Saving Grace on YouTube are all over the place and would seem to depend enormously on who the guest is. Get the right Love Island or I’m A Celebrity… guest and the views might get into the millions, but others are only in the tens of thousands.
This wouldn’t be quite the same type of “get” as The Ringer would be, and perhaps a show like Saving Grace is too dependent on non-Netflix IP, although I can see them ensuring all the Love Is Blind contestants appeared on the show.
But the bigger question is what Global wants to do with video, and how their podcast operation is transformed following this purchase. Perhaps jumping to Netflix right now isn’t the right thing.
And you just know that Steven Bartlett will have been talking to Netflix too, although I would imagine that would be more like the Mr Beast/Amazon model – creating something new for Netflix. His YouTube videos get millions of views, and that’s significant cash and reach to give up going by being Netflix exclusive.
One thing I’m sure of: whether it’s Netflix or elsewhere, we are going to see more “podcasts” on TV.