Today, my podcast's YouTube hit 100,000 subscribers. I'm way more excited, however, about this chart: We 10X'ed our watch time from ~100 hours per day to >1000 hours per day in 3 months. Here's how:
The podcast began over nine years ago as an audio-only podcast available on, e.g., Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Five years ago, I took over as host of the show from Kirill Eremenko. This coincided with us beginning to film video when recording episodes and releasing episodes on YouTube.
Up until a few months ago, however, video was more or less an afterthought for us: Everything about the show's format was optimized for being an audio podcast; we just happened to also provide video of the podcast being filmed. (And that's why we were stuck at a mean of 95 hours per day of watch time in 2025 up until July.)
Starting with our August 5th episode (#911 with Akshay Agrawal), we began an overhaul of our video format.
It's an ongoing evolution but some of the key changes we've made since August 5th include:
Shortening my intro of the guest/episode from several minutes to ~30 seconds.
Filming my intro to the episode with video (up until August, it was audio-only).
Adding animated text/graphic overlays to the beginning of each episode.
Incorporating extensive animations/graphics to YouTube Shorts.
Achieving this success of hooking YouTube viewers was a big team effort:
Our podcast manager Sonja Brajovic did extensive, magnificent and clearly-presented research on what the world's biggest podcasts do on YouTube as well as what the other big podcasts in our niche do on YouTube.
Kirill and I spent months deliberating the changes before settling on a new format that we thought would land and that would also dovetail well with our existing podcast-production operations.
Our in-house media-editing genius Mario Pombo brought all of these changes to life, all the while bringing his own innovative ideas (and thoughtful, critical questions) to the table.
We hired a YouTube-channel marketing expert (Chad Gravallese — highly recommend him!) to manage our channel.
Our partnerships manager Natalie Ziajski has been bringing in record revenue for the show, giving Kirill and me confidence to invest more and more in video production quality.
Next Tuesday's episode (#935 with Dr Stephanie Hare) a new adventure in video begins: That will be the first episode of our show that is available in both audio and video formats on Spotify. Excited to see where that, as well as continued our experimentation with video format on YouTube, takes us!
As always, would love your feedback! What do you think of the changes we've made to the podcast in the past month? What else could we do to improve the show?
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.