Podcasts Should Be Audio Only.
When do you listen to the radio? In the car, in the shop, while walking around, while doing other things that require your visual attention. Same goes for audiobooks, music, etc. Looking at a book or watching a show requires twice the time and effort because you can't really do other work while giving all your attention to a screen.
On a daily basis the majority of us are either commuting somewhere or are working at a desk, shop/garage, or outdoors. Obviously you can't sit and listen to your headphones while doing a customer-facing job like teaching or waiting tables, but you know what I mean here. There exists time in the day where you can listen to something while doing something else efficiently.
If I ever ran a gym I'd sell earbuds at the front desk beside the protein sakes and ready-meals. When I would go, everyone wore headphones (this was before AirPods) and the gym had a massive sound system that played heavy metal in a way that you couldn't tell if the speakers were blown or not. But everyone in there was listening to something while working out.
Work in an office? Need to focus on what you are doing? Headphones. I had a coworker who would come in at 9am, turn on this Ray Wylie Hubbard playlist and walk off to the shop floor for 3 hours. I got headphones very quickly. The shop floor itself? We had a boom box with a local classic rock station running all day. (This was a screen print shop.) But it's the same for any open air garage, there is a radio somewhere playing something.
That print shop job was a solid hour and a half from my house. (I assume most commutes these days are still an hour and a half due to traffic.) So what do you do in your car for an hour and a half? Listen to the radio. If you live in a place that has busses or trains, I'm sure it's the same situation.
But the radio plays different stuff at different times of the day. Your mix tape gets old after a few weeks. Well luckily we have these rectangles that can connect to the global-information-cigarette that lets you download or stream anything through your car.
This is great because now we can listen to podcasts and radio stations from out of state and every song ever. When I downloaded my first podcast to my iPod shuffle a billion years ago I had to manually transfer the file to my device beforehand. We were used to listening devices and media being offline.
Now we have the phone just connect to the car or headphones directly and manage it all from there. Which is fine until they decided that podcasts needed to be videos. So many new podcasts are now being posted to Youtube. The host is there in a decorated garage with expensive mics and light up signs on the wall. They have celebrities on like it's an underground episode of Oprah. If you have the time to sit and watch a TV show that's fine, but that's not a podcast.
I see so many people talk about wanting to be productive while staying off social media or look at their phone. You can listen to anything you want while not looking at your phone. It might require your phone to have connection or storing the files but you don't have to look at it and be tempted to doomscroll whatsoever.
Having video-first "podcasts" is just another way to keep you on the video platform the show is on. You watch a clip of it on instagram and now you're 15 reels deep and have eaten up half an hour doing nothing. The only people making big money on these types of things are already celebrities to start with. They bring in other celebs that talk about how fun it is to be a celebrity. It's only great if you like that one actor and want to know what they order at In-N-Out.
The first podcasts I followed weren't this kind of thing. They were recorded radio programs like Splended Table and Car Talk. Others were funded by news outlets and had journalists talk with real people about normal things. In 2006 I worked for a company that sold and installed pro audio equipment. I took pictures of the products and put them on their website. Every big brand was putting out a podcasting kit with a dynamic cardioid mic, a set of cheap headphones, and a digital interface that was either USB or Firewire depending on what kind of computer you ran all for under $100.
One of the points of podcasting is that it's supposed to be accessible for both the producers and the listeners. You just need to be able to record audio and upload it to a website that utilizes RSS. That RSS feed lets iTunes and all the other platforms get the latest episode. The majority of us out there can set up and host audio from a website just fine, but even then there are platforms you can pay to have it hosted and syndicated easily.
The point is that you shouldn't need to be looking at Youtube or Instagram or Spotify to access a podcast. If the podcast is exclusive to a platform, guess what? It's not a podcast, it's just a show on Spotify. These platforms need you to stay in the app to serve you ads, and if you are listening to it and doing something else then they can't do that as easily. Moving things to video-first keeps that app open and makes their stats go up.
A podcast should be something that someone could go into a library, sit at of the computers, type in the website, connect headphones, and click play. Even better, someone should be able to download all the mp3 files of the episodes and put them on a CD or mp3 player and listen anywhere. A low cost way to provide information and entertainment to anyone. No subscriptions or KYC required.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good Youtube show but I would never consider something like Tolarian Community College a podcast. A podcast is when Mark Rosewater talks for half an hour on his drive to work using his phone and the corded earbuds it came with.