Those of you who aren’t familiar with the podcast space may have missed the news early last year that YouTube became the #1 podcast platform in the globe. It had finally edged out Spotify and Apple, surpassing 1B “listens” per month. I took this in with wariness. I’m barely on YouTube (I succumbed to pressure and started posting my full Zoom recordings up there last month; I have 100 subscribers), and even if I had 10,000, I wouldn’t be able to summon the interest or energy to produce a TV talk show caliber video product. There are many reasons for this: Cost, definitely; Quality of guests, certainly (asking someone to show up in my city, looking camera ready is a very different request than a casual hour via Zoom); and also because I think there’s nothing more intimate than being in someone’s ears. In our highly/overly visual culture, there’s something very compelling about not needing to look at anything. (Plus, like everyone else I know, I’m a multi-tasker, so I listen when I drive, cook, clean, fold laundry, walk, etc.)

I’ve been told many times by well meaning types that if I don’t focus on video—and as part of this, create an inordinate amount of clips of said video (minute-long snippets from episodes to be blasted all over social)—I will likely not have a podcast in a few years. Maybe. But I’ve also been told by friends who have enslaved themselves to the YouTube and the social clip algorithm that they think all these clips have killed their shows. Why bother watching the whole thing when you can get the highlight reel?

All of my friends in the space and I have watched on as video podcasts have seemingly surged: Partly, this is because they’re prioritized by the algorithms. Sensing the threat of YouTube, Spotify went hard on video podcasting; it promotes shows with video more aggressively in the algorithm, and always shows videos when they’re available (you have to manually swap to audio, annoying!). Apple recently announced they’re introducing video, too.

I’m sure they’re doing this in response to the threat of YouTube, but there are financial implications too. Historically, platforms have been able to charge higher CPMs (an advertising term, which translates to cost per thousand impressions), meaning that over the years, they’ve juiced algorithms to try to make video more of a thing. Remember Facebook Live? So many small and mid-size media companies chased that dream and invested heavily in video when it was really, really expensive (and very low quality) because Facebook artificially promoted those Facebook Lives in an attempt to make them a thing; those media companies eventually lost their shirts (and sometimes shut down), because guess what? Nobody wanted to watch Facebook Lives. Artificially juiced audiences don’t stick. It wasn’t real. Everything went bust. (Video became short form and moved to Instagram, and then TikTok, and eventually YouTube shorts.)

When everyone went gaga for YouTube, I found myself poo-pooing the trend again. Part of this is my bias (just not a fan!), and part of this is that I do not believe that this explosive growth maps to “real,” sustained audience. Back in 2018/2019, when working on a TV show, the only thing we wanted to do was sit on a couch and talk—like a news magazine, or talk show—and we were advised that we needed to splice this together with visually arresting and varied content of people doing interesting things because…nobody watches people sit on couches and talk. They had all the data; everyone clicks away. I have a hard time believing that retention rates on watching people talk have improved in the past 10 years and yet suddenly everyone is paying out of their own pockets to create their own video talk shows.

I think people are much like my two boys—they watch, they scroll, they pause, they scroll. And for this, YouTube is huge—much like TikTok, you don’t need any subscribers to rack up views on your YouTube (anything under three minutes). (Max is racking up views with his astronomy videos: “I’m doing better than you mom.”) The YouTube shorts feed is based on interests, not curation. (Instagram is arguably the opposite—you theoretically see what the people you’ve chosen to follow post, though it’s become much more like TikTok in the last year or two where you’re more likely to see “Suggested for You” content from people you don’t know.) YouTube long-form video is a very different thing, though. Yes, some people are killing it, but it’s really hard to distill actual viewing habits from what looks like “views.” A 60-second watch counts as a view, which is why people are cutting NCIS-style trailers to get people past that window. Whether those people are sticking around to watch two hours of a conversation is a different thing entirely—I’ve heard that getting someone to watch 20% of something on YouTube is considered very healthy. On podcasts, metrics are opaque, but the expectation is that people listen to 80-90% of an episode.

So why am I prattling on and on about this? Because in this age of transparency, I think the marketing apparatus around video podcasts, video podcast creators, and YouTube is starting to expose itself—and we’re all going to realize that we’ve been played in pretty significant ways.

I had heard vague whispers of clip farms, but I didn’t really understand what people meant until Sami (of Betches) posted this on Instagram—it was after that kid Clavicular almost died on camera while livestreaming on YouTube. She had seen someone talking about participating in clip farms: The idea is that streamers and podcasters put out bounties for people to clip their videos and post them for cash. It’s like the next version of Cambridge Analytica, but instead of bot farms, you get gig workers: These real people create fake fan accounts and post video clips from podcasts and shows like crazy, earning bonuses for creating the impressions that thousands of “real” fans are digging this content and organically sharing it. Not only does it amplify audience for the podcaster/video creator, but it creates the illusion that their views are incredibly, organically popular, that these views are ubiquitous and shared throughout the culture, and that everyone is paying attention to this person and naturally drawn to what they make. It is fake it until you make it the max. Her point is that podcasters in the manosphere, people like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, MAGA, et al, have been running this playbook for awhile now—convincing us all that we’re living amongst loads of extremists who like really scary shit. In reality, it’s almost entirely fabricated.

People are starting to catch on, and my sense is that once more people understand the way our feeds—and our minds—are being manipulated, this whole apparatus will fall apart. Meanwhile, it’s all over our politics, and all over culture in general. Vulture just posted a piece last week about how Justin Bieber’s Coachella concert went viral through fabrication (here’s Sami on that one, too)—it’s called “The Feed is Fake.” Taylor Lorenz posted screenshots of Spencer Pratt’s L.A. mayoral campaign advertising on clip farming websites as well. The theory is that once someone engages with a podcast clip, they’ve been hooked and will automatically see more of that type of content, reinforcing that this content is everywhere because people are so enthusiastic about it they are sharing it into their feeds. Clippers will post thousands of pieces of content. It creates perceptions of popularity and eventually echo chambers. Joe Lim, quotes in Vulture’s piece, believes that “90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.” Lim had a company called Floodify where he ran 66,000 fake accounts. It’s definitely in politics, fintech, and pretty much anything else that appeals to (mostly) young men. (Here’s a Forbes piece on crypto clip farming.)

I’m guessing Diary of a CEO (Steven Bartlett), along with many other podcasters, have taken this in-house and now run a dedicated team of people posting clips across myriad accounts rather than risking exposure on clipping websites. I can’t figure out when this reel is from, but here’s one guy describing how he participated in a Diary of a CEO clipping campaign for $15,000: he earned $1K of that bounty by posting clips across dedicated channels, i.e. fake fan accounts, that he created for that purpose to earn views. I’m guessing that podcasters are becoming far more stealth as this begins to blow. I can’t imagine that the FCC is going to do anything about this. When brands work with influencers, it needs to be loudly disclaimered…#ad. But this is something else entirely. Here’s clip farm Vyro: On their home page you can see Theo Von, Mr. Beast, Mark Rober (sad), Logan Paul, DOAC, and more.

Instagram is pushing against this, even if they’re not saying that this is a push against clip farms. (Here’s Adam Mosseri explaining that Instagram will no longer promote content creators who post other peoples’ content without radically altering it.) I don’t spend much time on TikTok so I’m not sure what’s happening over there, and I am definitely not an expert on YouTube shorts, but I want to believe that more and more people will come to understand that they’re being manipulated through mob mentality, that they’re not joining an organic upswell of support but instead are part of an orchestrated infection.

And as for YouTube podcasts and the mandate to go full video (and fully produced video at that): I maintain that it’s a bubble. Theoretically, I can’t afford to lose my shirt either way, but I’m still going to sit this one out and see what happens on the other side.