Episode Details

You don’t need to look far to find a heated debate or surprising statistic about video in podcasting right now.

Video is killing podcasts! Video is saving podcasting! If you’re not doing video, what’s the point? It’s a lot.

Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, there’s one thing I’m sure we can all agree on: Every show is different, and adding video unnecessarily could kill your podcast.

So rather than continuously examining contradictory data or choosing which hill to die on, I spoke to some podcasters about their real-life experiences adding video to their workflow and the results (and challenges) it can bring. 

Darren Lake/ DLake

Host of the 1% Better Runner podcast

“Video is three times harder, but worth the effort”

Darren Lake, otherwise known as DLake, never actually set out to be a podcaster. He just wanted to create a platform where he could explore “weird content” about running. 

In the first three years, he produced about 40 audio-only episodes. But despite trying “every trick in the book” to grow his audio podcast, it struggled to gain traction: “I couldn’t crack the [running] niche, for whatever reason. Maybe I was too late.”

Adding a video component became a no-brainer. For one thing, running is a subject that has a lot more impact when visuals are included. His listeners repeatedly told him, “You should be on YouTube,” and “You have the perfect style for YouTube.” It also helped that Darren already had a lot of experience in front of the camera from his days as a music artist. It felt like “a very natural transition” for him.

He began experimenting with video in 2021 but didn’t immediately publish any content. Instead, he accumulated a backlog of 25 videos, which he then released all at once in 2023. The impact of this strategy was fast and transformative. 

The “YouTube algorithm is beautiful.”

Within 18 months of adding video, he gained 3.5 times the audience he had built in 6 years with audio-only content. He told me his content regularly performs 10-100 times better on video platforms than audio-only, with one particular video alone earning him 1,000 YouTube subscribers.

Since posting regular short videos twice weekly, he gains approximately 100 new streams per month on Spotify too. “When people know you have a YouTube, they’ll go to your podcast, they’ll go to Spotify, they’ll go to your Instagram“—but rarely, he says, the other way around.

Lake discovered that YouTube offers tremendous leverage: “I put in a little bit extra work for video, and I get 10, 20X, a hundred [views in return].” 

It’s worth noting that Darren’s video content is quite different from his audio-only; he adapts it heavily for YouTube so he can optimize for visual audiences. So instead of simply filming his long-form podcast sessions, he totally repurposes his content for a YouTube audience. 

Here’s how he does it:

• He shortens episodes to 10-15 minutes
• Adopts an “explainer style” format, talking directly to camera
• Implements scripting to make content more focused
• Optimizes topics based on YouTube search trends – “pillar content that people are searching for”

While he acknowledges th