Michelle Obama’s new podcast is off to a soft start on YouTube after launching on Thursday. The former first Lady’s new interview podcast had only 65,000 combined views across two episodes by Thursday morning after launching on Wednesday.
That includes 15,300 views on an hour-long interview with “Insecure” star Issa Rae, and about 50,000 views on a second episode detailing the launch of her new podcast, which she co-hosts with her brother, Craig Robinson.
For comparison, Gavin Newsom, another prominent Democrat-turned-podcaster, has pulled in 742,000 YouTube views in the seven days following the release of the first episode of his new show. Newsom, on his “This Is Gavin Newsom” podcast, interviewed conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on his maiden voyage pod, and followed that up this week with another conversation with a well-known right-wing personality, Steve Bannon.
The former First Lady’s new podcast is produced by Higher Ground, the production company she started with her husband, former President Barack Obama, in 2018. Both episodes of the show, dubbed “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson,” hit YouTube around 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday.
The inauspicious start on YouTube for the new podcast comes after it received a good amount of publicity before its launch, including a feature in The New York Times; the NYT story was titled “Michelle Obama’s Next Act: Video Podcaster.”
It’s worth noting the show is also available in audio format on podcast providers like Spotify and Apple, and listenership data on those platforms is not included in this number, although the show is ranked the 23rd most popular podcast on Spotify’s charts; Newsom’s podcast, for comparison, is currently ranked 5th overall.
Finding success on YouTube will be important, though, considering the Google-owned platform is a dominant force when it comes to podcasting.
Last fall, Edison Podcast Metrics named YouTube the most popular platform for listening to podcasts in the U.S. Based on the podcast measurement service, 31% of podcast listeners who were aged 13 years or older choose YouTube over Spotify (27%) and Apple Podcasts (15%). And at the end of February, YouTube said more than 1 billion monthly viewers watch podcast content on its platform.
