Jordan Blair was behind the wheel when she realized she had picked the wrong podcast to listen to.
“Today, we’re touching down in the ’70s to talk about Chippendales. Not these guys. Theeeese guys, whose name strangely comes from…this guy,” Harvey Guillén, the host of “Killer Stories,” said in the episode’s intro.
“Who? What?” Blair recalled thinking. Then she remembered: “Killer Stories” had begun offering a video version as part of a rebrand.
“When I realized that there was not going to be any context given, I was a little annoyed,” said Blair, a 35-year-old from Idaho. “I had to find something else to listen to.”
The podcasting industry has been embracing video at a breathless pace, to a degree where audio-only shows are becoming the exception rather than the norm. YouTube is now the nation’s largest podcasting platform. Spotify and Apple Podcasts have enabled video in their feeds. Netflix is adding dozens of established podcasts to its streaming-video lineup.
The shift is eliciting strong opinions from longtime listeners. While some say video is boosting podcasts’ appeal and making shows easier to discover on social media, others can’t help but feel that their beloved medium is neglecting them as it caters to another audience. They fear that video might—once again—kill the radio star.
“It’s almost like when somebody’s telling an inside joke in front of you and you don’t get it, you feel left out,” Erin Molnar said of her experience listening to some podcasts that have pivoted to video.
She was particularly concerned when her favorite show, “Armchair Expert,” started videotaping interviews. That move shocked many listeners because it happened a few months after co-host Dax Shepard had vocally opposed the idea, saying it would kill the intimacy of the format and make guests too self-conscious to bare their souls on air.
Molnar, a 37-year-old marketer from Michigan, thinks the hosts have done a pretty good job keeping the show’s vulnerability intact. But she feels annoyed every time they don’t bother explaining visual references, like a gift exchange in a 2024 holiday-season episode that left her in the dark.
“Sometimes I think you guys forget this is a podcast,” Kristen Bell—Shepard’s wife and a guest on that episode—told the hosts. To which co-host Monica Padman quipped: “If we’re not doing a good job talking about the items, I guess you should just watch it on YouTube.” (Molnar took that advice.)
Shepard didn’t respond to requests for comment. Guillén, who started hosting “Killer Stories” in January, said coming up with the right mix of visuals is still a work in progress. “I think we’ve learned as we go along,” he said. “And we listen to the fans.”
Many listeners say they love podcasts because they help fill the in-between moments of life, such as exercising, driving or grocery-shopping. Having to sit down and watch kind of defeats the purpose.
Betty Tice, who listens to about seven hours of podcasts a day while performing diagnostic tests in a Colorado hospital lab, said she had to rejigger her lineup recently to weed out shows that have become too visual.
The 51-year-old still regularly listens to some podcasts that pivoted to video, including the paranormal-comedy show “Let’s Get Haunted,” which she says is doing a good job keeping listeners in the loop.
Aly Terry said she and “Let’s Get Haunted” co-host Nat Strawn used to direct listeners to an Instagram page featuring images of items discussed on the podcast. But after hearing from blind listeners, she realized how important it was to carefully describe everything.
Terry said they started videotaping “Let’s Get Haunted” about a year ago solely to produce short clips to promote the show on TikTok and other platforms. Then last summer, they figured that if they were going through the trouble of making a video show, they might as well post it. Their audience has since surged multiple times over.
Podcasts’ video expansion has been welcomed by plenty of longtime listeners.
Kyle Shiely, a 50-year-old from Minnesota, said he’s been listening to web audio shows “before iPods—and the word ‘podcast’—even existed.” The rise of YouTube in podcasting has been a boon, he said, because it’s exposed him to shows he didn’t know about.
Katie Wudel, a 44-year-old editor from Nebraska, said watching podcasts occasionally helps avoid misunderstandings.
She said listeners of “Handsome,” a comedy podcast, frequently take to social media to discuss perceived drama between comedian Tig Notaro and her co-hosts. “Tig Notaro famously has a very dry personality and can say things that almost intentionally sound a little bit mean,” Wudel said. “But if you watch it, she’s often very joyful, and she’ll say it with a big smile on her face.”
Notaro said in an interview that “it’s a pretty fair leap to guess that on a comedy podcast, there’s a lot of joking going on.”
Notaro frequently exhorts listeners to watch the show on YouTube, which she said is a “joking nudge” to listeners and a running gag among the hosts.
“I would say ‘Go to YouTube,’ but I guess I am annoying people by saying that,” Notaro said during a late-March episode, a few days after co-host Fortune Feimster teased her about her overuse of the phrase. “Fine, you’re gonna miss out.”