How much do you use YouTube? I’m assuming a lot, because like 2 billion people per month use YouTube as a platform to share and discover content.
I have been actively using YouTube for the better part of a decade now — discovering and falling in love with amazing creators that have brought an abundance of perspective and happiness to my life.
However, I’ve start to realize one major thing: I simply do not need the video for most of the things I consume.
YouTube for Audio?
I use YouTube ALOT as a platform to discover new creators — new podcasters, sports pundits, political junkies, everything. And once I find the video I’d like to watch, I end up just leaving and letting the content play in the background.
This has been my own personal case study to realize that maybe I am not the only one that does this. Maybe a lot of people are just like me — really busy — and they use current platforms to discover content that are native to video but don’t consume the videos themselves.
The major thing about YouTube is that it is first and foremost a search engine before anything else. People go there looking for something and find it via the format of a video.
This means that when YouTube displays results, those results are constructed in the most optimal way to get people to click on a video in order for them to find what they are searching for — this will in turn give them a positive experience which will lead to them coming back to the website and allow google, their parent company, to make a lot of money.
Why Do We Click on Videos?
Outside of search and YouTube’s machine learning algorithms, I think there are two reasons why we click on videos.
The Thumbnail. The Title.
That’s pretty much it — there really is no other reason that gets us to click on something. The title has to be interesting and the thumbnail has to grab our attention. Outside of that, if we know the creator from previously consuming their content, we will likely click on it simply because we have an affinity for a certain creator.
At AUDEA, the company I am currently trying to build which in a nutshell could be deemed the YouTube for audio, that’s the exact same system we are trying to replicate. Based on my personal experience that I believe many other people also can relate to — the title and thumbnail gets our attention, but we only consume the audio.
This is not to say the video doesn’t matter — it’s just after 1 minute of seeing talking heads literally just talk, then one realizes they either can leave the video because it’s not meaningful enough to have them stare at it or they can go and do something while it plays in the background.
The important thing was that the platform was able to put those thumbnails and titles in front of you to get you to click, even if you used the video just for it’s audio.
I think a lot more people only want the audio because they are recognizing they simply don’t have time to stare at a video nor care that much to in the first place.
What if there was a platform where the thumbnail and title, the two crucial elements necessary to get someone to click were there, but when a user clicked, it would take them into an audio only experience.
I think a platform like that could work because it would take away the burden of a user trying to discover new content since the home feed would push that content in front of them — at that point, if the title and thumbnail are interesting enough, a user would click and then volunteer to engage in an audio only experience.
This only fails if the user really does want a video that they can glance at from time to time and feels uncomfortable with the experience of clicking on a title and thumbnail and only receiving audio, as if they were robbed of a true content experience (and I can’t blame them — YouTube has conditioned us to have this feeling)
I’m just willing to bet that once a user is able to close the app and still have the audio play in the background, once the user gets conditioned to realize that they don’t need the video (which they already admitted they really didn't need in the first place) and once the user is actively now searching for audio vs. video, then a platform like this could succeed because it has the visual elements necessary to click but the audio experiences necessary to get someone to passively consume and not leave the content.
If only a platform like this existed…
Amit Kukreja is the founder of AUDEA, an audio-sharing distribution platform that is aiming to democratize the potential for spoken word creators to become discovered.
You can contact me at amit@audea.io or reach me here:
