Podcasting in 2025: Long-Form vs Short-Form Strategy

All right, we'll get started here in a second here. I can probably get started a little bit early here. My name is Rob Greenlee. I've been a podcaster for 20 years. Actually, I started in the radio. Back when I started in the radio, it was about 24, 25 years ago, but been podcasting for, you know, like I said, a long time. And so I've made a lot of changes and evolutions over the the years as far as being a content creator, and that's what I'm increasingly thinking of myself as. But as you can see up on the screen here, I've got a company now. I've worked for Podbean, Lipson, Spreaker, PodcastOne. So I've had a long journey in working with content creators and working with podcasters and have seen the evolution of the podcasting space happen over many years. And I think we're at another inflection point. And that's, that's kind of the theme of the topic that I want to talk to you about tonight or today. And, and I also have a, like, like a podcast creator community as well as everybody else does these days. So if you wanted to scan the QR code, that'll, that'll get you into that. And it's really a podcast network of sorts. But it's an area where people can collaborate with me, do, do one-on-one calls and things like that. So I can actually help you kind of strategize as we move into this new era of podcasting. And so this concept of going from being a, a podcaster to a content creator is not really a huge shift, but I think it's a, a mental shift that we all need to be starting to think about and actually probably pushing forward, because I know that's the choice that I made a couple of years ago to, to start really focusing on being a content creator again and, and focusing on, you know, moving what I've been doing, which has been primarily audio, over to other forms of media, which is video and short-form, long-form content. And that's what I want to talk to you about today, is that the podcasting space has been very traditional in its view of being an audio-only platform. And I'm not saying all this to say that audio isn't a very important aspect of podcasting. I believe it is. But I do also think that the winds of not so much change, but evolution is, is happening in the medium where if you want to be successful now, and I think a lot of the really large content creators now are seeing this pathway, and I think it's, it's good that we as an industry understand the shifts that are happening at the upper echelons of this medium so we can adapt and be stronger as we think about our strategies and how we want to approach being a content creator. And I think that's the big thing. And being a content creator really involves a lot of aspects around creating content for all these social platforms, TikTok, Instagram. I've been doing live content more than ever over the last year or so. I was under contract with StreamYard for a year to create content on their platform to help podcasters make this shift if they want to add video to their portfolio. And I think, you know, it's not a requirement and I'm not up here to say that, you know, this is really the path forward. But I think if you want to add video to your content offering, it can add a different dimension to your your content and who you're gonna reach with your content. And I think that's very, very powerful. It's all about audience, right? So as you think about what the audience is looking for, increasingly they're looking for a balanced diet of audio, video, because they're, they're likely consuming this content increasingly in, in different kind of areas of their life, right? So audio plays well in a, in a very portable medium on your phone. You can listen anywhere, you know, you're waiting in line to get your license renewed or something like that, and you can be listening to a podcast. You can be watching a video too, a short-form video, and I think that's what's happening. But more and more people are shifting over to consuming content on smart TVs. As people are moving away from cable television and things like that, they're looking for online content. And, you know, I know with my own consumption process, I'm consuming a lot more video off of like a YouTube platform or a Netflix or Rumble or a bunch of different video platforms. And so you're seeing this bifurcation of the creator economy that's happening right now. And I think each one of us has to decide, you know, and I know this is a track about AI and I think that there is a, a piece to this that involves AI that can make it possible for you to be more efficient in what you're doing around being a creator. And that's kind of like the, the more, more detailed level of the kind of tools that you use, you know, like with what Larry shared with you is, is terrific advice as well and using AI to your advantage, but This is all about appealing to audiences, right? So podcasting, and I think a lot of people forget this, podcasting at its core was really a medium that was trying to be efficient in how it was going to reach audience, right? And an audience through this RSS syndication concept, right? Where you publish it once, it goes to all these listening apps, and that was very efficient. But we are moving into an era where more of these big platforms want you to have a direct relationship with them, right? Spotify, Apple, you know, X, TikTok, all those platforms. There's no one place to publish necessarily unless you're doing live that will get you into all those platforms now. So we're all being challenged to, to become overloaded with work, because I think that's the big obstacle as we look to the future here is, is that we're, each one of us are gonna have to decide because we just don't have time unless we have built a big team. And that, that's what a lot of these big content creators are doing is they're, they're adding, you know, virtual assistants and they're adding people that can support them because the demands of being a content creator now are so great. That you got to get help, you know, but if you want to be a solo creator, what you have to do is you have to get niche and you have to get focused and you have to figure out which platforms cater to your audience and who you're trying to reach in the best way possible. And that's where it kind of backs up into becoming less of a podcaster and more of a creator, right? So you have this, you know, you just kind of open your mind to the possibility that, maybe taking, taking a more inclusive strategy, I guess, to your media, how you're distributing your media, and figuring out the most efficient ways of actually doing that. So that's, that's what I challenge everyone today to think about, right, is, is for the kind of show that you're doing, what's the best platforms that you need to be working with? And how are you going to reach new people that can grow your audience. Because at the end of the day, podcasting has always grown from word of mouth sharing, right? People suggesting your show to other people. And so that's been a very powerful method for many years. It's proven out in the research, though many will tell you that more content is being discovered in YouTube now than, than ever, right? People are thinking, They're watching a podcast, they're, they're going to YouTube and they're searching for their favorite podcast in, in YouTube more and more because YouTube has changed their messaging, right? They've added a podcast playlist, which all of a sudden makes them a podcast consumption platform, which in some ways is true. And in some ways is kind of not true. A lot of the content that lives in YouTube is different than the content that lives in podcasting. And the success on YouTube doesn't always translate into success as podcasts, and going the other way as well. So this is a complicated area that we all have to figure out and navigate for each one of us in our individual content and doing research in the market to understand who the other shows are that are, you know, working in your genre or creating content that reaches the same type of listener, if you can kind of see what they're doing and people can share information, that's been one of the strengths of podcasting since day one is the ability to share and learn from others too. So if you can friend somebody else that's in your genre or something like that, you guys can swap stories, right? Because oftentimes you're not really competing with even the people in your own genre because each show is so unique. Right? So you're, you're able to kind of coalesce audiences from a bigger pool if you kind of learn from others and you make slight adjustments to your strategy. So let me talk a little bit about long form and short form. So you have these, these two areas that we all have to wrestle with, right? It's, it's one of those big areas of conflict in the podcasting space is that You know, should you do short form? Should you do long form? And what's the right length? What's the right, right duration? And I think as you think about your content that you're doing, you can do long form, create short form from that. You can also focus on just creating short form content and then maybe occasionally do long form. So there, there's kind of two ways of approaching this. And, and fortunately AI is really helping with this. AI is able to help you streamline your clip creation process. If you're looking to do some, some vertical videos, but also if you want to create short versions of your, of your audio show, you can do that now with AI, which hasn't always been easy to do in the past. But you also have to look at AI with a little bit of a skeptical view too, because AI is not human. Now, like Larry said, you can You can train it to be more like you. And I think that's what the future looks like, is that these AI tools are going to learn so much about you that they're going to be able to, in a lot of ways, replicate what you're capable of doing. I don't— that's good or bad depending on one's view on that. It's not an entirely rosy picture, but, you know, at the end of the day, what is the audience going to trust? That's actually the bigger, bigger question, right? Are, are we going to have to label AI-generated content as AI-generated content? And we may see a shift towards people like saying, well, I don't trust AI content. It's not authentic. I'm going to want to listen to real humans. As we may see tags in content now that would identify it as AI-created, human-created. So we may see this kind of bifurcation on this. But the short-form and long-form content really plays into your strategy of what you're trying to do with your audience and what you're trying to do with your content. At the end of the day, your podcast is you and what you want to do. But increasingly there's pressure on all of us to say, let's go out and look at the market. Let's go out and look at what people want, what other people want, not necessarily what I want. And I think that's the biggest challenge. I mean, I spent 20 years in this medium trying to do content that helped me in hopes that it would help others, right? So I would create content based on my passions, my interests, what I wanted to learn about, because I was getting a multiple benefit from it. I was building a network, I was building knowledge myself, and hopefully through that process I was helping others, right? And so I was doing long-form, mainly hour-long content. And if you look at the stats, the top 200 podcasts are averaging about 60 minutes. So, you know, I'm not saying that that's the ideal length. The ideal length is what is right for you and what you're trying to accomplish with your content. How many days a week are you publishing? Are you publishing once a week, once a month? There is no ideal format for this, but I have seen a lot of evidence from talking to a lot of content creators that publishing more frequent, more frequently actually results in faster growth. Now, how you can sustain that, I, I've talked to some people that wanna do content 5 days a week, right? That's hard to sustain over the long run and you, you run a risk of burning out on that. And it depends on what's involved in the content. If you're doing like maybe 5-minute shorts every day of the week, that's, That can be a good way to grow as well. But typically podcasting, if you look at the audio side, is a deep engagement medium, right? So you want to get people to listen longer. If you look at YouTube, YouTube, it's very difficult to get people to listen longer. People are used to bouncing around. It's almost a little bit like broadcast radio when people would be on their, their, their car radios and they'd be like skipping stations, you know, back and forth between the radio breaks. People are bouncing around in content in a lot of these platforms, especially in TikTok and these, these social platforms, because they're like scrolling through. It's like a dopamine hit. And they're, they're always looking for that next funny video and things like that, or, or strange video or something. I mean, I find myself doing it too. It's, it's very appealing. So, so finding this balance is, is the difficult task here. So let me jump ahead. So going deeper with your content, I, I think is the best approach as you look to building a relationship with an audience. And authenticity is having an increasingly important layer, especially if you look at at YouTube. YouTube is really becoming rapidly, and I'm sure many of you have maybe noticed this if you use YouTube a lot, but trending topics are basically the driver of YouTube. And what the contrast is with podcasting is podcasting tends to be a little bit more longer-term or evergreen content kind of concept, right? People are It's usually prerecorded. It's not real time. It's not published as frequently. You're going in deep into topics. And, and what we're seeing on YouTube increasingly is creators creating shorter content more frequently. And that is a challenge, right? And then there's other creators on YouTube that are doing deep research, deep video production. And really trying to come up with a compelling story or an interesting thread of discussion that enlightens us into various aspects of our reality and our world and people, health, sciences, AI, all those kinds of things. And people are building huge channels over there on that. And I think that there is some overlap with podcasting. I think that a lot of the longer form video creators on, on YouTube oftentimes are creating successful podcasts as well. So, so I think that's kind of where we, that's where things are going right now. And you have to decide which side you want to play on. What's your content? Is it, is it trending topics or is it, you know, more content that maybe will last a longer period of time? I mean, I've, I've created videos on YouTube like 17 years ago that have gotten hundreds of thousands of plays, but they were videos that had no really production quality, had no real, you know, I had my phone and I was recording it and I was just doing voiceover into my phone talking about EVs and electric cars and hybrids and things like that back when they were something new. So I think that there's a little bit of a takeaway there that content that you publish into like a YouTube lasts a long time, possibly, and trends come and go in there around topics, right? So a lot of people create a lot of politics content over the last 6 months to a year on YouTube, and that kind of comes and goes. And there's a lot of talk right now around, you know, the political topic not being as hot of a topic anymore. Because the election's not coming up. So, you know, trends come and go. The things that people are thinking about come and go. And that tends to be the type of content that I'm seeing more on, on YouTube. So if that overlaps with what you're doing with your podcast, then there's a great connection between those two areas. So, and then, you know, one of the other differences between podcasting and like a YouTube type of a platform, if you're a creator, is the level of data that you're getting out of it. You know, YouTube has got like layers of data to help you analyze what you're doing with your show at a level that you're just not going to get from podcasting. So, so it can also be a way to do a little bit of audience research when you're over on YouTube at a greater degree than you can in a podcast, because you typically in a podcast maybe can see a little bit of a path of when people are listening and when they're dropping out. On YouTube, you get like granular data around how fast people, you know, hour by hour, how many people are watching and when are they dropping off and when are they, you know, watching it and when are, I mean, it's just incredible the amount of data in there. And then all of the demographics and everything that really give you a good glimpse on who your audience is and where they're listening. And all those type of things is just unbelievable over there. So it's, but at the end of the day, your audience is looking for something out of what you're doing and, and building a community as part of that. Right. So as you think about being a creator and building a, a community around your content and building community, I'm not saying is easy. It's, it's something that the, that the medium has been moving towards for, for a few years now, where people are looking to build their own direct relationships with their audience. And at the end of the day, that's what the trend is, is that we're seeing content creators wanting to build their own private communities, maybe take a certain amount of their content, publish it into their own groups that they have. And monetize that or actually take more control of that. Because a lot of content creators have been through this era where of what I call kind of moderation and censorship that's been going on on YouTube and some of these larger social media platforms. And if they're talking about topics that, you know, are pushing the envelope on controversies, they may want to put them behind more of a private experience. And I'm seeing more and more content creators trying to do that as well. It just depends on what they're doing. I mean, a lot of folks have been burned by YouTube for takedowns for all sorts of reasons. And so that's, that's another area that, that can get in the way of your, your approach to the market depending on the content. Because let's say at the end of the day, controversy and trending topics drives audience. And, and the problem is, is that if you go too far down that rabbit hole, and sometimes it's hard to know how far down that rabbit hole you can go without getting in trouble. I've, I know lots of, lots of large content creators that just went a little too far over the last couple of years and they got much of their content taken down. So, you know, this content moderation stuff is, is challenging all of us to know where that line is, right? How far can we push controversies or conspiracy theories that turn out to be true 6 months later? But that's, that's a whole nother topic I don't want to get into. But it's, it's always about focusing on value, right? So in a second here, I want to get into your, your questions as well. So if you have any thoughts that you want to ask, But let's, let's move into the next thing. So staying ahead of the rapid changing kind of industry of being a content creator, right, is, is really embrace the AI tools, really try and understand where, where the value is. So let's say you're trying to get Shorts, then try out some AI tools that can do shorts for you efficiently. And because if you're a solo creator, you're going to have to be efficient with this stuff. You can't, you know, you can't spend lots of time in Adobe Premiere doing a bunch of, you know, deep, deep processing and editing of videos. It's just going to eat up all your time. And I also use a tool called Descript, and I'm sure many of you have heard of that. And it can also help with editing. I kind of do two different things. I kind of do a different edit in Descript for my video because it does have the ability to edit audio and video at the same time, right? So you can accomplish both of them at the same process. You can take out, you know, like words that maybe you don't want in there, like ums and ahs and things like that very easily, but it can also overdo it too. So you have to kind of like just take out just a few of those out of your audio. And then also you can cinch up the gaps if you want to. It just depends on what your content is and how you are as a presenter. If you have large gaps in your spoken process, you can actually tell it you can remove a half a second for every, you know, take every half-second gap in your audio and it will actually pull that out. Now, if you do a separate edit with the video and do less of that, because video can be very jerky in editing, so you have to be a little more cautious on the video side, but do a separate process for the video and then do a separate process that's maybe a little deeper edit, because you're not going to be able— I mean, it's just audio. So if you cinch out any like significant gaps between the words that you say, you can kind of speed up the process to some degree and make the audio sound a little smoother. But you have to be careful too that you don't do that too much. I mean, you don't want to sound like you're a machine gun talking. So you want to still have some inflection. You still want to have some pauses and things like that. But, you know, if you tend to with your audio have gaps, right? If you have gaps that are like over a second or something like that between sentences or anything like that, the AI tools can do that very quickly. And I think that's, that's going to save a lot of time for a lot of creators, especially in the beginning. I mean, because they may not be able to, I mean, you as a creator may not be able to afford to pay for an editor, right? That can actually do that human-wise, right? So it's very helpful and I found it very helpful too, because I don't have a team around what I'm doing. I'm trying to do it all myself because I want to learn it all. So I just want to, to get stuff out and have it be as, as good as I can, as quickly as I can. And that's the, that's the other power. And then a lot of these tools have the ability to improve your sound too. So if you, which is increasingly making it it's okay to have less high-quality equipment, right? So you can actually make a terrific podcast on your, on your phone now, and it's not going to be sounding bad if you run it through like an Adobe Podcast, or if you run it through like a, like a Numano platform, or there's all these normalization and audio optimization platforms that are out there now that you can take any audio, run it through, and it'll sound like you're in a professional studio. So those are all great, great tools to work with depending on what you're trying to do with your show. So anyway, I want to transition now, take questions if anybody has any. I would love to hear your questions and your thoughts too. So I don't know if we have a microphone that can go around. That'd be great.

Do you have a preferred AI tool for long-form video writing?

Yeah, it's, I think it's Descript at this point. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the most flexible, but it does take a little bit of learning about how to tweak it so it doesn't do too much. Because I think you can overdo it with Descript too. I think you can edit too much.

Kind of the bottleneck in the company where the video editing is by far the most teaming out.

Yeah. I mean, I think you can probably cut it in half and still come out, come out with a good product. The danger that I've seen is editing video for your audio is, is a danger because most people have more editing that needs to be done to their audio than to their video usually. So if you want to make a version of your show for video that you want to maybe put up to YouTube. Maybe do a little bit of an edit, different edit on that. So how I usually do it is I do the video first through Descript and I set all those settings and then I export it, get it out of there. And then I go in and I do a deeper edit on the audio and then I export that separately. That's how I usually do that. Yeah.

Yes. I think Jeff did a little bit of a short form. A video or video?

Uh, I don't have one that I can share with you right now, but I think if you just go to any of the, of the, uh, short, short content platforms and just spend some time watching them, see what resonates with you, see what works with, with you. But are you looking for the tools that can create them or the, the platforms to watch them?

No, I'm talking about real short, 60 seconds. That's the length. Uh, but I wonder about, uh, LinkedIn because you can go up to 10 minutes on LinkedIn, but nobody's gonna watch 10 minutes.

On, on Shorts? Yeah, right. And it's the same, uh, YouTube I believe changed theirs to 3 minutes. So I think they were, they were just a minute for a while, but then they shifted to 3 minutes. So as with a lot of these platforms over time, they, they tend to shift to longer form content. It's the same thing that happened at Twitter X too. When they first started, it was only 140 characters and now they're like, you can publish like 5,000 characters now. So, you know, there's a progression that happens with all these platforms. So anybody else have a question or comment or anything? I would love to create a dialogue here. Wait, it's upon.

Been doing, you know, recording for Riverside.

Good people. Riverside. Yeah. Yeah. I've used them many times. Yeah. They're a good, good quality recording platform. Yeah. And I, I did a 1-year contract with StreamYard. So I'm, I'm, I'm very familiar with that platform too. They are quite different between the 2 of them. One is the StreamYard side is more of a kind of like a studio production capability with overlays and logos and, and transitions and, and different cameras and that kind of stuff where, where the Riverside is really at this point anyway, is very focused on quality and trying to get like, like your guest in an equal screen. It doesn't have as much, I guess, kind of creative elements to it, right? It just gets you the, the audio and video that you want. And the audio and video quality is really great. So go ahead.

Yeah, I was gonna respond. We actually used it to replace our video switching board that we were, my partner and I, usually—

Oh, really? Okay.

Usually now we're basically joining the Riverside session from a different laptop or iPad. Once we both have your other laptop, you can go to the same studio.

Ah, yeah.

We've got an $800 Roland board that we don't need anymore.

Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of these live streaming tools now are so capable now. I mean, I mean, I love doing live on them because I can actually bring in comments from all the social platforms too. So if people want to contribute to the show and want to get into a dialog with me, they can do it real time right through Twitter and/or X and LinkedIn and YouTube and it comes right into my dashboard and I can actually throw it up on the screen. So, and then talk about it. So just like what I'm doing right now, it would be the same process. Yeah.

Have you heard Transistor versus the, you guess, Senior? Like, whatever the other one is.

Oh, well, if you're talking about Transistor, they're a podcast hosting platform. So I think they mainly just handle audio, I believe, but I'm not as knowledgeable about transistors. Yeah. So if you want to, you know, there's plenty of really, really good podcasts, audio podcast hosts that are out there. And, and quite a few of them are in the exhibition room. Buzzsprout, Lipson, who are actually— I used to work for Lipson and, and PodBeans out there as well. Blueberry, which I do a weekly live streaming podcast with the CEO of Blueberry. Todd Cochran. So I've been doing that show for about 12 years, 13 years now. And if you wanna check it out, it's just at show.com. And we do that show live every Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 PM Eastern. And that, that show is really talking about the big trends in podcasting, where it's going, kind of just breaking news about the podcasting space. So am I outta time? Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

All right. For those of you that want to see the question that is working, you can find the animated human video for you guys.