The Telegraph is building its next audience strategy around video podcasts, live events and memberships as search and social referrals become less dependable for publishers.
But its route away from Google Search still runs through another Google-owned platform: YouTube.
The Telegraph’s podcast audience has increased 161% year over year, while its three daily news shows now generate an average of 2.4 million weekly YouTube views, according to Digiday.
The publisher currently produces five regular video podcasts and plans to launch four more shows before the end of the year. It has also doubled the size of its audio team to more than 40 people.
Matthew Bayley, The Telegraph’s executive editor of audio and visuals, told Digiday that video was becoming the primary way people consume news and journalism.
The investment is currently focused more on building an audience than generating immediate revenue. However, The Telegraph is considering a separate podcast subscription and a YouTube membership offering that could give paying viewers additional content and access to its hosts.
The strategy reflects a much wider retreat from relying on search traffic.
Google Search referrals to more than 2,500 news sites fell 33% between November 2024 and November 2025, while Google Discover traffic declined 21%, according to Reuters Institute research. Publishing executives expect search referrals to fall another 43% over the next three years.
YouTube offers publishers reach, repeat viewing and more room to develop recognizable journalists and shows. But it does not entirely solve the platform problem.
The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that the growth in online news video is happening on third-party platforms. Video consumption on publishers’ own websites and apps fell by five percentage points.
The Telegraph is therefore not simply turning podcast listeners into an audience it completely controls. Much of that relationship remains mediated by YouTube’s recommendations, membership system and rules.
There are signs that some viewers are moving onto its properties. Video views on The Telegraph’s homepage more than tripled between the first and second quarters of this year, although the company did not disclose how many of those viewers were subscribers.
That conversion will determine whether the strategy truly reduces platform dependence or merely exchanges Google Search traffic for YouTube views.
The larger experiment is not whether a newspaper can produce successful podcasts. The Telegraph has already demonstrated that it can. It is whether a publisher can use someone else’s algorithm to build an audience it eventually owns.
Photo: Fred Romero/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Image cropped. The former Daily Telegraph building on Fleet Street in London.
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