How established formats, audience needs and resource considerations shape video podcasting strategy at leading publishers, from podcast powerhouse Goalhanger to slow news start-up Tortoise Media and research-focused non-profit The Conversation UK.
All the data points to video being a powerful tactic for supercharging audience growth and podcast discovery, but is video something all podcasts should be doing? Our episode this week features a panel discussion from this year’s The Publisher Summit on how three very different publishers plan, produce and distribute their video output.
Panel host Daniel McLaughlin, Podcast and Series Editor at Reach plc, was joined by Alice Sandelson, Director of Business Strategy and Partnerships at The Observer, Tortoise Media; Nicole Logan, Executive Producer at Goalhanger; and Gemma Ware, Head of Audio at The Conversation UK.
Listen to the full session below, or search for MediaVoices’ The Publisher Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.
This was a broad ranging discussion around the pros and cons of video podcasting, but the big takeaway was that there is no one-size fits all solution to video strategy. Visual output should be led by established formats, audience expectations, and resource availability.
McLaughlin opened the discussion by asking the panel how their organisations use video in podcasting and, as you might expect, the answers varied significantly according to each publisher’s primary format and editorial mission.
For Tortoise Media and The Observer, Sandelson said video takes second place because of the organisation’s focus on long-form investigations. “Creating six or seven hours of video from a scripted podcast would essentially mean we were creating full documentaries,” she explained.
The solution for Tortoise is to create platform-specific cuts, from short-form social content to mid-length documentaries for YouTube. “Whilst the audio series might be six to seven hours, the video version might be 10 to 15 minutes,” Sandelson said. “We do a huge amount of cut-downs for various platforms.”
The Conversation UK, a non-profit with limited resources, has been producing audio podcasts for a decade, but has recently run limited video trials. “The challenge of moving into video has been real,” said Ware. “We’ve just experimented with our first video podcast, a health podcast called Strange Health.
“We chose that because we built it around the host of that show. We knew it was going to be a lot more conversational than some of our other shows.”
In contrast to both Tortoise and The Conversation, Goalhanger moved the vast majority of its slate to video at the beginning of 2025. “We really went gung-ho, full into video,” said Logan. Despite the investment in video, she described Goalhanger as ‘platform-agnostic’, focused on serving its audiences wherever they want to receive and interact with its shows.
“For the audio purist, you can still listen to The Rest Is Entertainment audio-only if you want to, but then if you’re listening on a platform like Spotify, you can seamlessly switch to video when you’re sat on the Tube, and then when you’re walking to the office you can put it back in your pocket and just listen.”
Resource challenges
Tortoise’s Sandelson acknowledged the need to serve audiences where they are, but said it’s important to produce video that represents the brand, “Creating a video version of the full podcast that we’re proud of – not just having the audio playing with a nice background – would require resource that we don’t have at the moment.”
She wondered, if the resources were available, would Tortoise opt for full video productions. “If we were able to do that, would we do both? Probably yes, because we recognise that for some people, listening and watching along for six or seven hours is the experience they’re looking for with that content. For others, actually, that 10-to-15-minute, very focused video storytelling version will serve their needs.”
Ware agreed that there is real value in using video to help The Conversation meet its mission of communicating academic expertise to a wider audience. “We really try to get those academics out to the world, get their knowledge out to the world. The more we can do that on video platforms – short clips of somebody talking about the vagus nerve – then that can help our brand reach new audiences, younger audiences as well.”
However, she also sees challenges in creating clips of sufficient quality to represent the level of academic expertise in The Conversation’s content. “We’re always having new voices, new people, new guests on our shows, and they’re all over the country because they’re academics. The video quality you can get with online recording is obviously much better than it was even five years ago, but it’s still tricky.”
Acknowledging the resources challenge, Logan said repurposing content is the perfect starting point. “If you can, and you’re really thinking about expanding the brand, that’s when you want to start thinking about bespoke content that lives on social media for a social media audience, but that comes second to really understanding how to repackage what you’ve already recorded for the different platforms.”
Video for growth
Whatever the logistical challenges, the value of social video in audience growth was underlined by everyone on the panel, with McLaughlin citing a statistic that showed 72% of new podcast listeners and 68% of long-term podcast listeners said they had started listening to the audio-only version of a podcast after discovering the video version.
Logan said Goalhanger doesn’t think about its output in terms of the discrete components, where the RSS audio version is the ‘pure product’ and everything else supports it. “Making a product that serves our TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram audiences is just as important as making a product that serves our RSS audience,” she explained. “When you were watching the clips, you’re still a Rest Is Entertainment audience member for us; you’re just in a slightly different part of the engagement funnel.”
Sandelson also saw huge value in the distribution of social clips. “We have a very specific goal at the moment, which is to introduce The Observer to digital audiences, younger than the print readership. We’re focused on all of the different ways we can engage that audience – not necessarily to always bring them through the funnel, but to build brand, build awareness. The platform audiences, whether it’s Spotify or YouTube, are incredibly helpful in enabling us to attract those audiences.”
Logan reassured the audience that video audiences don’t tend to cannibalise audio audiences. She said: “You don’t have to do a video podcast. You could just say, ‘no, that’s not for us, we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the time, we’re editorial purists’. But if you’re looking for growth, and if you’re looking for new audiences… the growth is in the video part of the market.”
Listen above or search for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you find podcasts.
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