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Google Podcasts has been sitting on Google’s deathbed for a few months since the announcement in September. Now, a New support story details Google’s plan to kill the product, with the shutdown coming in April 2024.
Google Podcasts (2016–2024) is Google’s third attempt at a podcasting app after the Google Reader-powered Google Listen (2009–2012) and Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020). The product is closed for the podcast app Number 4, YouTube Podcasts, which was launched in 2022.
Google support articles explain in detail how to take your subscription with you. If you want to go from Google Podcasts to YouTube Podcasts, Google is very easy with one-click button to music.youtube.com/transfer_podcasts. If you want to leave the Google Ecosystem for something that has little chance of closing in three to four years, you can also export your Google Podcast subscriptions as an OPML file to podcasts.google.com/settings. Google says that exports will be available until August 2024.
With the upcoming shutdown of Google Podcasts, we might think that YouTube Podcasts is ready, but it is a very difficult service to use. I think it has all the main points of the podcast somewhere, but it is buried in many menus. For example, you can go to youtube.com/podcasts, where you’ll see a landing page of “podcast episodes,” but no obvious way to add podcasts to a podcast feed, which is the main feature of a podcast app. YouTube prioritizes YouTube engagement, which means your YouTube-first brand will suffer from audio-first podcast content.
I thought that the first proof for “YouTube Podcasts” is that many people are putting content on YouTube already, in the form of news or talk shows, so the addition of podcast-style links in YouTube it will be easy to use. I don’t think that happened YouTube, though. There’s a lot of media content floating around on YouTube Music, which features a button with a random icon. “Save to library” will be shared to a podcast feed. The problem is that the world’s second most popular website is YouTube, but not YouTube Music. Music is a separate entity, site, and app, so none of these billions of YouTube viewers are seeing these podcast shows. Even if you try to connect with YouTube Music’s podcast feature, it will damage your YouTube playlists and library with podcast content. It is very difficult to use, even for someone who is looking for this and trying to understand it.
But this is the future of Google’s podcast content, so the company is pioneering it. Google Podcasts is only a few months away. If you’re looking to get off Google’s wild ride and want something real that works on ads, I recommend Pocket size.