Netflix Skips Comedy in First Podcast Slate — Why It Should Lean In

Recently, Spotify announced a partnership with Netflix this will bring 16 video podcasts Netflix in 2026. The concerts in the deal belong to Spotify Studios and Calland are as follows:

Sport:

Non-sports:

Notably, this deal prevents the company from continuing to stream full episodes on YouTube, which serves as the hub for most video podcasts today. Considering YouTube is Netflix's biggest competitor (except sleep), this makes sense. But what's most interesting about the streamer's first podcast is what's not included. While the first wave spans the realms of sports, pop culture and true crime, it doesn't include a single comedy title, which is surprising given Netflix's long-standing affinity for comedy and reputation as an emerging leader in the field.

Sources indicated that this omission is not permanent. Comedy podcasts will definitely be part of future waves of programming, even if it's currently unclear when they'll hit Netflix or which ones they'll start consuming first.

Either way, the omission is glaring given how dominant comedians have become in the video podcast space. Indeed, it looks like in 2025 every established comic will have their own podcast. Their audiences vary greatly, but in real time the gap is undoubtedly widening. Once everyone “turned on their TikTok cameras” and video became the norm, many comics separated themselves from the crowd of podcasters vying for the public's attention.

Look no further than Kill Tony is the world's self-proclaimed #1 Live Podcast. hit Netflix earlier this year in a three-way deal. First Specialist Kill Tony: Kill or be killedoutperformed nearly every other stand-up special released on Netflix in the first half of 2025, according to data obtained from Recent Netflix series What We Watched report, which received 8.8 million views in its first three months on the platform.

In recent years, Kill Tony reached a viewership that rivaled and often surpassed the leading late-night talk shows. According to Nielsen data, such as ABC Jimmy Kimmel Live! an average of 1.85 million viewers watched an episode in the third quarter of 2025, according to NBC The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon averaged 1.23 million viewers. Data we collected from the last 10 episodes of the YouTube native channel. Kill Tony shows that the show has recently averaged 2.74 million viewers per episode.

It's also far more viewers than Netflix's recently launched talk show. Everybody Lives with John Mulaneyas you can see below.

For Netflix—a company whose stand-up shows regularly rank among TV's top 10—comedy podcasts seem like a natural next step. Like a dedicated podcast, it can reach a huge audience on a minimal budget. But unlike a special episode, which can take a year or more to develop and ultimately only contains an hour of content, a podcast can be released weekly and reach the same size audience.

Interestingly, the audience for the podcasts selected as part of Netflix's initial slate pales in comparison to the audience for many major comedy podcasts. Let's take a look at the average viewership on Spotify and YouTube for the 16 series that came to Netflix over the last set of 10 episodes:

Spotify has historically not offered transparency to the public about viewership, but we were able to assess The Ringer's podcast reach because the company recently changed its policy to begin performance of plays in episodes that attract an audience of 50,000 or more people.

Per their websiteSpotify's play metric reflects “the total number of times people actively listened to or watched an episode.” It's unclear what “active” means here, and whether it tracks users who listened for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, the entire episode, or just pressed play. But this is a massive update that finally reveals what has always been a private metric.

I mention this because half of the first podcasts arriving on Netflix do not have a public Spotify play count, indicating that they achieved fewer than 50,000 plays in each of their last 10 episodes. To be clear, listening/viewing on Spotify and YouTube does not provide a complete picture of each show's audience: Apple Podcast users can account for 20 to 50% of total listeners, not to mention podcast player apps like PocketCasts, Overcast, and iHeart. But it seems odd that these shows were among the first picks, given their relatively low overall reach compared to other popular video podcasts.

Notably, this is one of The Ringer's newest and most popular podcasts on Spotify. Good communication with Amy Poehleris not part of the original deal with Netflix, despite regularly racking up 1 million streams on Spotify and over 500,000 views on YouTube:

None of the Spotify Studios shows with a YouTube presence—13 out of 16—average even 100,000 views per episode. In other words, Good hang consistently reaches more people on YouTube than the other 16 podcasts. combined.

It would make sense for Netflix to lean more toward groups of comedians who have demonstrated the ability to consistently reach large crowds in front of the camera—perhaps shows from comedy podcast networks like All Things Comedy, Headgum, or Big Money Players. All Things Comedy, for example, is currently producing multiple shows achieving the same reach as The Ringer's show on Spotify (where The Ringer supposedly has a home-field advantage given its deal), while making five to ten times more than The Ringer.”With YouTube reach:

The main driving force behind ATC's success on YouTube may be that their show is actually showwhose creators understand the importance of A/B testing thumbnails and optimization for discovering their own platforms. They take into account internal metrics such as click-through rate, average view rate, completion rate, and all other factors that lead to a YouTube video receiving high organic reach.

Moreover, these are shows created, hosted and performed by people who are professionally interesting, exciting, entertaining, charming and watchable. The Adam Friedland Show practically modern The Dick Cavett Show. Comedian Rick Glassman does or says something funny about every 10 seconds. Take off your shoeswith cutaways from pre-taped sequences and impeccable cinematography. Even shown further down the list in terms of name recognition, e.g. Business casual show, are full of one-liners, visual gags, and are much more enjoyable to watch than to listen to because the hosts are professional comedians accustomed to entertaining large crowds at live performances.

Polera Good hangfrom The Ringer and Spotify, is aptly named – She and her guests (who are more often than not other comedians who have been professionally making people laugh on camera for decades) are simply amazing people. However, this is in stark contrast to many of the shows on The Ringer, which started out as audio podcasts and slowly transitioned to video. Many of their presenters are not conventional on-camera talent, but former journalists who were forced to adapt to the 2010s media ecosystem, when their employers built state-of-the-art recording studios and went to the races with pencils down, microphones on and cameras off.

After the pandemic, everyone started podcasting from home, realized it was much cheaper and more convenient, and many of them continued to do so for several years. But in doing so, they sacrificed audio quality, production value, and the main reason many people tune in to a podcast in the first place, which is to be a fly on the wall of an interesting conversation they would otherwise have no business being part of.

Last year, many of The Ringer's the capsules returned to the studio with the obligatory transition to video; Looking back, it's clear why. Objectively, they look better: with standing positions and multiple camera angles, they resemble a daytime talk show or something you might see on ESPN while running on the treadmill at the gym; In other words, they are now what the podcast video streaming platform needs.

For streamers, however, there's only one KPI to optimize if you already have someone's monthly subscription revenue and aren't selling ads—time spent on platforms—something that comedy podcasts can provide in a way that dedicated offerings never could.

All this suggests that comedy could be an even bigger boost to Netflix's viewership. And as a curator looking to harness the power of podcasting, the platform should strive to identify shows with high fan mobilization, using its marketing budget, share of voice, and international distribution to catapult overall reach in a way that creators are unlikely to be able to do on their own on YouTube. That's what Netflix did Kill Tonyand it certainly worked.

However, Netflix should also aim to target shows whose audiences aren't so large that creators would lose more than they would gain by giving up the ability to distribute and monetize full episodes on their own YouTube channels. For The Ringer, of course, this last stumbling block isn't a problem: the majority of their audience comes from places like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, so the sacrifice is worth it.

In conclusion, if Netflix's main goal is time spent on the platform, the logic behind their dive into the world of podcasts makes sense: they're creating a catalog of things you can leave running in the background.
Exhibitions with high VORSB (Value of Baseball in the Regular Season).

But part of me wonders if they're betting on the wrong horses at the right racetrack. Netflix quickly backed Matt Rife and Shane Gillies after their own specials earned millions of views on YouTube. So why sleep on comedy podcasts?

If the platform wants to succeed with its podcast initiative, it will have to start licensing shows that people won't be able to look away from.