TikTok’s podcast experiment, which started earlier in 2023 and spent most of the year under the radar, is coming to a close. Beta testers of “Podcasts on TikTok” received a message from the social platform announcing the feature’s discontinuation, as of Friday.
The full message reads: “We wanted to inform you that later this year, we’ll be discontinuing the current beta test of Podcasts on TikTok. The podcast feature will be available until December 15th. At this time, podcast episode content that was uploaded to the platform will be removed from the platform — however, your TikTok videos will remain published. We value our podcast creators and see an immense opportunity in the audio space, but at this time we are focusing our efforts on other initiatives.”
“We regularly experiment with a variety of features on a regular basis to learn from our community and gather insights for platform development. Thank you so much for participating in this beta test and your continued support. We look forward to working together again in the future.”
The short-form video site allowed podcasters to link their episodes to videos, which could then be played by users in the background as they continued to watch videos, but had limitations, like a 90 minute episode maximum. The discontinuation comes as YouTube enjoys massive success in the podcast sphere and TikTok works on global launches for its new music streaming app.
of course they all fail