- Donald Trump won the election with the help of personalities like Joe Rogan.
- Rogan is a podcaster, right? Well, yes, but he’s also a YouTuber.
- And Rogan is one of many podcasters who have large audiences on YouTube. Trump invested time with many of them.
Podcasts played a big role in Donald Trump’s re-election this week.
Right?
Or maybe it was Twitter. Or TikTok.
It could be everyone. And it may also be that the people interested in those mediums and platforms have reason to want to believe that they were important.
But if you’re going to look at how the internet played a role in the election and you’re not talking about YouTube, you’re doing it wrong.
So, once again: YouTube is massive — so massive that it generated $50 billion in revenue last year, most of which comes from advertising. Advertisers are spending that money because that’s where the eyeballs are.
And of course, some of those eyes consumed a lot of political/election content over the past year. Pew Research says 32% of American adults regularly get their news from YouTube — more than any other social media platform except Facebook, at 33%. And I’m pretty confident — based on my unscientific survey of my teenage sons, who soak up YouTube — that those numbers are much, much higher for young people.
What do people who watch political stuff watch on YouTube? In some cases, it’s just another version of TV: Fox News reportedly drew as many as 1.1 million concurrent viewers for its Election Day live stream on YouTube. That was about 10% of its conventional TV audience, but still notable for a very young-leaning platform.
Overall, YouTube viewers consumed 67 million hours of live streams on Election Day, per streaming charts.
But what was most interesting about the election was how the Trump campaign spent the summer embracing YouTube personalities. Starting with people you’ve heard of, like Joe Rogan, to those you may never have heard of before this year, like the Nelk Boys.
Wait a minute! I can hear you saying. Isn’t Joe Rogan a podcaster?
Absolutely. But Rogan, like many other creators/influencers/personalities, creates content that lives on multiple platforms at once. You can listen to his podcasts on Spotify, but you can listen to them – and watch them – on YouTube.
And this happens much more often than you might think. Edison Research says YouTube — including regular, free YouTube and the paid YouTube Music service — is MOST popular way for people to listen (or watch) podcasts.
You can see it in some of the numbers. Rogan’s October interview with Trump has drawn a whopping 47 million views (note: Don’t try to compare this to a TV rating, as YouTube reportedly counts a “view” as 30 seconds of viewing — and someone who watches for a while stops and returns to the same video later in the day, it will count as a second view). The one he did with JD Vance this month is now over 15 million. But even a standard-issue interview with Rogan can generate 2 million views or more.
And there’s a universe of conservative podcasts, or podcasts that aren’t political but open to conservative guests who make big numbers on YouTube, from former Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly to the former star of reality TV show Theo Von. Trump visited all of them. You can also find clips from their shows on places like Instagram and TikTok. But they focus their efforts on YouTube, for reasons that make it very creative.
For starters, you can find a large audience there. And YouTube’s algorithmic discovery mechanism means creators can get in front of audiences that weren’t looking for them.
Instead, podcast audiences grow slowly — but tend to stick around when they connect with someone they like, says Chris Balfe, CEO of Red Seat Ventures, a company that helps sell the likes of Carlson, Kelly and Bari Weiss of The Free Press. advertisements for their shows.
And, unlike platforms like Instagram and TikTok – podcasters can get a significant portion of the revenue from ads generated by their YouTube audiences. (There are also liberal/left-wing podcasters/YouTubers, like Crooked Media, the company behind Pod Save America. But there aren’t nearly as many of them, and they don’t have the same kind of reach, as journalist Taylor Lorenz notes.)
So should we call these people podcasters? Or YouTubers?
Yes, says Balfe.
“I think they’re the same thing. We should think of it as a podcast plus a YouTube pick,” he says. “Or a creator economy choice. Top-performing talent does well everywhere.”