I Don’t Want To See You, You Seem Bored
On the crass commercialism of video podcasts
Before all this talk of second screen experiences and streamers telling showrunners to dumb down scripts, there was a category of writers who catered to a half-distracted audience. I was one of them. I worked in news.
In college classes on writing for broadcast, professors encouraged us not to take attention for granted. Our audience was cooking, commuting, or chasing kids around to get ready for school. They weren’t intently watching the screen or staring at the radio speaker. But this wasn’t art or entertainment, this was the delivery of information.
Multitasking is, if not the reason for mobile media, then the secret to its success. Radio couldn’t survive without people listening in their cars. The Walkman, the iPod, the AirPods with their volume settings that automatically adjust to the noise around you—these are replacements for silence or the noise of the outside world. They are, as Shuhei Hosokawa wrote in the excellent essay The Walkman Effect, tools for giving control over the environment.
Most phones didn’t have radio tuners in them. None played cassettes. And moving MP3s took a cable. When Apple dropped a dedicated podcasts app onto every iPhone, it made talk the competitor to streaming music. Before 2012, podcasting had been not necessarily nascent, but niche—time-shifted public radio shows ruled the charts, with public radio-esque reported shows close behind, Slate gabfests gaining ground, and a few independent chat shows in the mix. After iOS updates and the Serial surge, the medium had more fans and followers. Independent shows, programs made by upstart studios, and new ventures from established media companies took off.
This year, the hosts of the film podcast Blank Check have been cheekily dropping jokes about “a decade of dreams”—a Disney-esque way of marking their tenth anniversary. The show started as a production of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv company and was, at first, only about the Star Wars prequels. It was partially a parody of Serial where the hosts investigated whether the trilogy made any sense, and the overall idea was in line with the gimmicky shows of the time (for instance, The Worst Idea of All Time, from 2014, followed its hosts as they watched Grown Ups 2 every week). It’s been ten years since the debut of the late, great Another Round—one of Buzzfeed’s forays into podcasting, whose Hillary Clinton interview helped establish the idea that candidates should go on podcasts during the campaign. This summer is also the tenth anniversary of the You Must Remember This season on Charles Manson and Hollywood, and of the debut of the British comedy show My Dad Wrote a Porno. The year 2015 in podcasting was a little like the early years of Prestige TV. There were a lot of shows out there, but the good ones had everyone talking. Except unlike with TV, almost anyone could try to make a podcast, and some of the best shows came from people who hadn’t made one before.
Then the money swept in. Most of it went to a few players for whom passion and desire seemed like less of a motivation to make a show than profit or boredom. Longer chat shows, political extremism, outright commercials (why does Trader Joe’s have a show?), and various celebrity “brand extensions” have crowded the medium, putting a lot of gilded chaff on top of the wheat.
Now podcasters are trying to make TV. Well, I use the word “now” a little loosely. Video podcasts developed along with audio podcasts, but YouTube was the more natural home for such shows. In the early years of the COVID pandemic, as bored homebodies recorded their Zoom calls for public release, they cut short clips to promote episodes on social media. These clips might be the funniest joke, the most scandalous remark, or whatever pseudo-philosophical blather a host found the most likely to be enlightening. It was so popular, faking an appearance on a podcast became yet another online grift. In a media world dominated by TikTok and short video, the brief video clip was a clever way to grab a new audience.
I get it. I worked in public radio and for years we made “Audiograms”—short videos of animated waveforms paired to a clip from a story or show, with subtitles. The goal was to give people a taste of what we were doing in hopes they would sign up for more. We used animated waveforms, crassly, because a little bit of motion might catch someone’s eye in an infinite scroll. Audiograms never really worked to do anything other than get a bunch of trolls yelling at us as they took an out-of-context clip even further out of context. Video clips give a little more context, which makes them better as promotions.
But then the clips expanded to the whole show. The line between podcaster and YouTuber faded. Podcast studios have become video-friendly, with neon lights in the background, monstera plants, and other hallmarks of late Millennial home decor (plus a sponsor message or two). The hosts could be recording in the waiting room of a subscription-based doctor’s office, a medical marijuana dispensary, or an AirBnB in Austin. Other shows seem aimed at people with Stockholm Syndrome for the Zoom years. They’re a splitscreen of the hosts talking in their respective homes. This isn’t limited to home productions or amateur startups. More then two million people follow the Kelce brothers’ show, and the video of it looks like two guys getting ready to talk quarterly reports.
I know the reason shows do this. They need an audience. More people are on YouTube than podcasting apps. Plenty of YouTube users put the video on in the background and focus on other tabs. It’s like TV news.
But the difference with TV news is that, even though we wrote it assuming people were busy buttering their toast or figuring out what to wear, we wanted to find an arresting image—a reason to look at the screen, to pay attention to what we said and to use the full breadth of our platform. With radio, we tried to create “driveway moments”—stories that would keep a listener entranced enough that they would sit rapt in their parked cars, staring at the speaker. We looked for ways to more effectively deliver information. With video podcasts, the video exists just to exist.
This fundamentally breaks what a podcast is. In this platform-centric era of media, moving to a new platform means adding a completely different audience, an audience with different expectations and different habits. The shows bend to appeal to people who aren’t tuned in. The fast food review podcast Doughboys (also now celebrating its tenth year) starts every episode with an invitation to go to YouTube. That is, the show opens by inviting the listener to stop listening.
The host of one of my favorite news podcasts recently posted to BlueSky, “ugh apparently we’re on YouTube now,” and attached a video clip of the show. This sums up the general approach a lot of podcasters seem to have taken with video. It’s just another thing they have to do. It’s a sign of the dire financial straits independent media are in that they need to try and compete on every possible platform, even those they don’t want to be on.
The reluctance reminds me of another trend I’ve picked up on. Early in podcasting, the host-read ad spot gained a new type of value. It was like the old-time radio and TV shows when a host took a little break to make a personal appeal for their favorite brand of cigarettes. For a long time in news, these were expressly forbidden. Having an arbiter of information selling a product was a betrayal of trust, an insult to the audience’s intelligence. I’ve never thought it was a good idea for podcasts to go down this road. Some boundaries should remain, no matter how good the money is. Lately, it sounds like a few hosts agree with me. In ad breaks, I hear snide comments and disinterested script reads. The hosts seem to want the audience to know they don’t really care about cookie-scented deodorant, vitamin supplements, or sports gambling (real sponsors for real shows). I hear hosts break the fourth wall and say “now here’s a call to action” or “the email says I should give you a personal testimonial.”
Is any of this worth it? Is the money that good? Are the video numbers that big? Is it worth reading the YouTube comments and seeing the TikTok stitches? Is this why you want to make a show? On the one hand, there are endless celebrity and brand podcasts that sound like lazy cash grabs, and there are ideologues pushing bizarre and heinous conspiracies. On the other hand, there are good shows where the hosts seem bored, disconnected, and resentful of the demands of an audience they hope to attract. Who really wants to be making a show? Who wants to listen?
Again, I get it. I get that this is what it seems like you need to do to be a podcast in the year 2025. But this is a situation that came about because everyone was doing more, chasing the same measures of success on the same platforms until everything took the same basic shape. I know the finances are tough on podcasts. It’s why so many are going to Patreon, where the pledge structure encourages shows to offer even more—another episode each week, longer edits, more work for hosts and producers. It’s tough competition and hard work. But in a time when everyone is doing more, one way to stand out is to do less.