YouTube․com/podcasts goes live as simple ‘Explore’ page

Abner Li | Aug 21 2022 - 6:33 pm PT

YouTube organically became a place for distributing and watching/listening to podcasts, and the Google video service is widely expected to offer a more optimized experience. This is starting with a YouTube “Explore” page for “Podcasts.”

Back in March, a leaked presentation revealed YouTube’s plans for a “podcast destination page.” YouTube.com/podcasts is now live and is linked to on the existing Explore page alongside: Trending, Music, Movies & Shows, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, and Fashion & Beauty. It appears to have first gone live in late July, and is slowly becoming more widely available as it’s not showing up for all users we checked with today.

Available on desktop web and mobile, it’s very rudimentary at this point. There are carousels, which can be expanded via “Show all,” for “Popular episodes,” “Popular podcast playlists,” “Recommended,” and “Popular podcast creators.” The rest of this page links to various categories: Comedy, True Crime, Sports, Music, and TV & Film.

You’re just browsing through regular video thumbnails rather than anything more optimized. Meanwhile, tapping one just opens the regular player on Android, and doesn’t even default to the “Listening controls” available for YouTube Premium subscribers. You get large buttons and shortcuts to like, save, and quickly adjust playback speed.

The podcast experience for end users will presumably get more optimized over time, while it remains to be seen what the UI in YouTube Music is going to be. Hopefully, it’s out of the way for people that just want to use that application for songs.

Meanwhile, Google Podcasts will presumably be folded into this rather than existing as a separate app. That’s a shame as that experience, which is part of Search, was quite simple and efficient.