How New Statesman Made Podcasts the Spine of Their Multimedia Strategy

By: Esther Kezia Thorpe.

UK news and politics magazine the New Statesman is well-known for its commercially successful and highly popular podcast analyzing the latest developments in the political scene. Over the last 18 months, as YouTube has become known as a leading platform for podcast consumption, Executive Producer Chris Stone has been turning his attention to video podcasting, and the potential of the format for growing the New Statesman’s audience both as YouTube subscribers and podcast listeners.

The publisher’s foray into video podcasts came about in a number of stages. They began by experimenting with audio podcasts with a waveform, audiogram-style. But Stone explained that because the New Statesman was also starting virtually from scratch with its YouTube channel, these audiogram podcasts weren’t driving the growth needed. “The audio-only podcasts with the waveform were very limited in how effective they were at [building an audience],” he said. “But it was useful because it started to give us some preliminary feedback from a YouTube audience.”

The next step was to put in one or two cameras during the recordings. “That wasn’t every recording by any means; at that point it was just when we had a particularly interesting guest coming in, or when there was a particularly big moment that we were trying to speak to,” Stone noted. This was a useful stage because the podcasts with video began to get a little more traction.

In tandem with these experiments, Stone had also been tasked with building out the New Statesman’s video strategy separately to the podcasts. The channel was trying out many different content types, and it quickly became clear that the format which was working well on YouTube with their nascent audience was extended interviews and ‘talking heads’.

“It became apparent that the best course of action with our limited resources was going to be making the podcast the spine of our multimedia operation, and for video to be an additional part of that, rather than building up video as its own separate proposition,” explained Stone.

Refining workflow

Once the decision had been made to center the podcasts, the team began trying to make more video content of the podcasts in earnest. But the workflow was still clumsy. “Every time we were recording the podcast, we would lug all the cameras to wherever the podcast was being recorded, set them up, you’d need a couple of operators, two or three cameras, and it was really quite an unwieldy operation,” Stone said. But it started to get some results; enough to prove that there was an audience on YouTube worth pursuing. 

A grant from YouTube and the European Centre for Journalism helped toward a dedicated podcast and video studio build, with fixed cameras. The whole studio can be operated by just one or two people recording the podcast, capturing video and setting up autocues. 

The final part of the workflow to smooth out was production. Stone said that discovering Autopod, an automated vision mixer, was a game-changer for their video strategy. The technology uses audio from the mics to automatically cut between cameras, making the creation of a ‘talking heads’ video podcast far more efficient.

The YouTube channel and video strategy is now established enough that Stone knows when they release a video from the podcast, it will add additional audience. “We’re in a position where our podcast audience has more than doubled, taking into account both audio-only listeners on RSS feeds and YouTube consumers,” he noted.

The question of whether YouTube viewers see the New Statesman podcast as a ‘podcast’ or a video is unclear, as YouTube doesn’t give much of a breakdown of people who are actively watching compared to perhaps listening in another tab. However, Stone did explain that he sees commenters using words like “listen” or “podcast,” so some people are aware that they’re consuming a podcast.

Video podcasts as a brand awareness tool

The New Statesman is a subscription publisher with a metered paywall online as well as a weekly print magazine. However, content like podcasts and videos are available for free. Stone says that when it comes to their conversion funnel, social channels are at the top, with full video and podcast pieces in the middle of the funnel. They are important strategically as they help improve platform health—Instagram and TikTok are the publisher’s fastest-growing platforms because of their video efforts—as well as brand awareness and marketing.

Although they run subscriber calls to action on YouTube videos, moving viewers and listeners from the middle of the funnel to the bottom is something Stone is prioritizing this year. There are potentially some options for integrating subscriber-only podcasts with the New Statesman’s own paywall technology and subscription packages. But Stone doesn’t see the New Statesman taking an Economist-style approach of paywalling their already very successful podcast portfolio.

“I think probably the stronger proposition is identifying what’s going to create the highest propensity to subscribe among your most engaged listeners, then adding a product that meets that need, rather than taking your entire catalog behind the paywall,” he explained.

His strategy appears to be paying off. Video views have grown to more than 8 million each month, and subscribers to the New Statesman’s YouTube channel have gone from 2,000 to nearly 110,000. YouTube ad revenue now makes up a quarter of their platform revenues, with programmatic ads from podcast distributor Acast making up the other 75%. 

Advice to other media operators

So should we all be doing video podcasts? Stone advises that it depends on how important video is as part of your content mix. “Try and start doing video as early as you can,” he said. “Weigh up what’s achievable versus the resources that you’ve got. What a lot of people do…is think about the content that we want to make, but we don’t think enough about how we’re going to get people to listen to that content. So baking in an audience acquisition strategy from the outset is really important.”

“Likewise I would say with commercial and monetisation, it isn’t ‘Build it and they will come’. It’s ‘Build it, and only build it if you know how you can monetise it’. Because otherwise, you’re wasting your money.”

There is also the question of total addressable market. Niche B2B publishers may well see less in terms of returns on YouTube if monetizing through their programmatic advertising because the viewership just isn’t there.

Although timescales are difficult to estimate, Stone said that from his experience, patience is key. Executives shouldn’t expect “meaningful returns” from YouTube in less than a year if starting from scratch, and if that then has to include time spent learning how the algorithm works, and learning how to tailor content for the platform, “then you’re going to add maybe six months to your overall runway.”

He also emphasized the importance of getting the right people in place. “This is an underappreciated skill for publishers; understanding that audience teams, audience people who have knowledge on , experts who know how to produce podcasts, market them, promote them, experts in YouTube distribution and monetization, all of those things are really important skills that are sometimes overlooked, and sometimes left to people who either don’t have that skillset already, or new people coming in,” Stone explained. “If you’re really serious about it, bring somebody in who has verifiable knowledge and experience, and you’ll [see results] a lot quicker.” 

Profitability from there will depend on a media company’s wider commercial strategy and revenue mix. But with the right people in place, a publisher could see enough growth and get enough information to know whether a video podcast strategy is worth pursuing within a year.

Regardless of whether video is something publishers feel they can add to their content mix, Stone had one final piece of advice. “Not doing video shouldn’t stop you doing a podcast,” he said.