Lateral full episodes

Yes, it sucks that full episodes of Lateral aren’t on YouTube. Ideally, YouTube would understand how podcasts work and serve them to viewers accordingly.

To set the background: Lateral was originally going to be audio-only. Filming it makes everything far, far more expensive and far, far more difficult. Plan A was to only ever post highlights on YouTube: the full episodes were meant as a taster, to see whether people will watch the full thing on YouTube. (That should have been clearer, and in hindsight, we should have just started with posting the highlights, and not set that expectation.)

The thing is: people aren’t watching the full episode on YouTube. Episode 1 had a decent viewcount from direct links, but almost no-one is clicking on the video when YouTube recommends it to them. Those that do, don’t stick around. The retention and click-through rate statistics are the worst I’ve seen for a modern YouTube video. It’s not working on YouTube. It’s dying there, because it’s unsuited for the medium — the title, thumbnail and long-form content are not YouTube-friendly.

So we thought, okay, we’ll keep the full episodes going up, but the highlights will act as adverts to point people to the main show. And we made them clear. It says “highlight” in the thumbnail, it features faces that the audience have already seen, and the title is a subject that people will recognise. You’d think that’d work. Nope: doesn’t matter, we get angry comments and dislikes and then those videos die as well. Which means the entire show dies. Splitting the channels won’t help with that: if people aren’t reading the thumbnail or title, they’re not going to read the channel name. That system will only work for people who use notifications or the subscription box: which, based on the stats from other channels, is only around 3% of potential viewers. 97% of people rely on YouTube recommendations.

Meanwhile, those 97% of people who find the highlight videos through recommendations, either on YouTube or TikTok or other social networks: they haven’t seen, or maybe haven’t even heard of, the full podcast. They watch the highlights, and they like them, and they stick around — subscribing on a podcast platform, which is designed for exactly this sort of content.

Which means the only viable solution is: post the highlights on YouTube, and use them to point people to the full audio show, which is what Lateral was always intended as.

I am sorry: ideally everything I’m part of would be accessible to everyone. Ideally I’d have re-edited versions of main-channel videos with audio description, and versions with sign language, and versions in multiple languages. (And ideally, art galleries would have audio description and radio would have subtitles.)

Lateral is, unfortunately, intended as audio — as a podcast/radio show — and despite our efforts, YouTube’s limitations mean there’s no easy way around that.

I know this isn’t a helpful response, but hopefully it explains what’s going on.