In a way, Conan O’Brien is returning to the swing of hosting a late-night TV show.
Beginning next Monday, May 12, SiriusXM‘s Team Coco will start releasing full video episodes of “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” his weekly interview podcast, on its YouTube channel.
Ryan Reynolds is the featured guest for the first full-length video podcast on YouTube. Team Coco will premiere the video episode, which runs about 65 minutes, at 6 p.m. PT on May 12 on YouTube (at this link). Beginning May 19 new episodes will be released in the morning, concurrent with the audio-only podcast. O’Brien’s next scheduled guests are comedian Sarah Silverman and Paul W. Downs, the actor-writer who is the co-creator and co-showrunner of “Hacks.”
“Full body, full episodes, of ‘Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,’ available Monday. Yeah,” says O’Brien, stretched out on a sofa, in a YouTube Shorts promo video.
Previously, Team Coco has released 10-15 minute clips from “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” on YouTube, so much of the content never made it to video. Adam Sachs, SiriusXM’s senior VP of podcast content, believes that putting full-length video episodes on YouTube will boost engagement and monetization opportunities.
Sachs noted that YouTube has emerged as the top platform for podcast consumption and now has 1 billion monthly viewers of podcast content. Today, “podcasts are being watched on the couch,” he said.
Sachs was previously president of Team Coco until its 2022 acquisition by SiriusXM for $150 million, as reported by Variety. When Team Coco started the podcast in 2018, “We said, ‘This is very separate from [O’Brien’s] TBS show.’ We were almost precious about the fact there wouldn’t be cameras in the studio — the idea was, it was an intimate, organic conversation.” O’Brien’s TBS show ended in 2021. Sachs’ joke with O’Brien is that the podcast was just “a backdoor to do a new late-night show.”
Team Coco previously tested two full video episodes of O’Brien’s podcast, with positive results. The 2024 show with Larry David as guest has garnered 2.2 million views to date, and another with Harrison Ford has 1.2 million views. Meanwhile, other SiriusXM podcasts for which video episodes are released to YouTube are “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” with Ted Danson and “Literally! With Rob Lowe.”
The expansion of “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” on YouTube comes as O’Brien has captured a renewed presence in the zeitgeist. He hosted the 2025 Oscars to critical acclaim (and secured a renewal for the gig next year) and delivered a viral acceptance speech the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (which premiered this week on Netflix). And Season 2 of his acclaimed Max travel series, “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” premiered May 8.
“Conan is having a moment,” said Sachs.
With O’Brien’s higher visibility of late, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” jumped from No. 29 in the fourth quarter of 2024 to No. 18 on Edison Research’s Top Podcasts chart.
For now, Team Coco will distribute the full video episodes of the show only on YouTube; it’s worth noting that Spotify has stepped up its efforts to attract video podcasts as well. “For us, YouTube is where we’ve had a presence for a very long time,” Sachs said. He also said content discovery on the platform is very good — half of the views on Team Coco’s YouTube channel are driven by the algorithm.
There are new sponsorship opportunities with “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” Sachs said. For example, when O’Brien reads a sponsor’s message, the show can now feature the product sitting on the table in front of him. SiriusXM also is looking at selling presenting sponsorships with visual placement in the Team Coco studio.
Team Coco’s YouTube channel started as a channel for clips to promote the TBS late-night show. That strategy performed so well “it became its own business,” Sachs said. “So when we did the podcast, clips made the most sense. That has been our default up until now.” Now that Team Coco has more than 9 million subscribers on YouTube, Sachs said, the team concluded that “it feels foolish to not put the podcast on video.”
Team Coco, as part of promoting the new season of Max’s “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” is releasing bonus episodes in the “CONAF” feed recapping the first three episodes of the travel show. Those will be released on May 8, 15 and 22, replacing the usual Thursday “Conan O’Brien Needs a Fan” episodes during those weeks.
From Variety US