Short Vs Long-Form Podcast Episodes: Which Performs Better

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Su.

0:20All right, so we're going to talk about short versus long form podcast episodes and which one performs better. So let me set the stage here. Now, for marketing school, I believe we are coming up on seven years now, actually, Neil. I was looking at when this started. It's seven. Yeah, it started in July of 2016. So we're coming up. Now, we started this podcast, focused on short form five minute episodes because we saw so many people doing these interview episodes. You know, in the very beginning, like everyone loved it. For the first three to four years, it's like we shared everything we knew around marketing.

0:52But over time, when you do the daily ones, sometimes you just end up repeating the same thing, right? We got some feedback from people on the reviews and we're like, okay, you know what? We'll show you a different way. And so we show them a different way and we just completed two of our reaction videos and these are longer forms. Let's forget these. let's not use the word reaction videos. I think they're the wrong type of verbiage. Just think of it as - You're the wrong type of verbiage. And long form episodes. Our episodes were five minutes on average, and now we're trying 30 plus minute episodes.

1:24Vernacular, longer form or reaction, whatever you want to call it, right? So point being - It's easier to understand from a marketing standpoint, right? When we're breaking down the stats. Yes, you're right. Don't ever interrupt me again. I'm just kidding. So we'll go with long form, what Neil's saying. Look, we want to show you some stats. If you're on YouTube right now, I'm going to show you the stats that we have on our Apple podcast. And I'll show you how a long form episode performs versus a short form one. Short form is around five minutes or so. And then our longer form ones are about 30 minutes plus.

1:53And I'm going to share my screen right now. Neil, you tell me if you can't see it yet. I haven't started sharing yet. One second. Sharing my screen right here. This is a short form episode. So Neil, Can you read out what you're seeing maybe on the plays and the consumption for this episode? So this is just Apple Podcasts. And Apple Podcasts for a recent episode is 840 listeners. This must be a really old episode, is it? It's not old, no. Apple tends to under-report kind of the data, but I do like the consumption and the plays data. So let's just look at things from like a ratio. 1 ,800 plays and average consumption is 68%.

2:34Okay. Now, so this is a short form five minute one. Again, these are not like, you know, the Apple stats aren't the most, when you compare them to like Chartable or you compare it on megaphone, it doesn't look like this. It's actually much higher. When you compare it to this one, this one's a longer form video over here. So you see this down here? 934 listeners, 3.4 thousand plays and 58 % consumption. And this is just on Apple. let's break down the math over here 58 consumption on a 35 minute video that's 20 minutes okay so 20 minutes times the number of listeners or the number of plays you can even say right that's much higher on like a minutes listen to on this episode okay now let's compare to this one so again this one got 3400 plays almost double the 1.8 over here and plus like on a minutes just minutes comparison, the longer form has a lot more engagement.

3:29Does that make sense? Listeners, I'm assuming means unique people who are listening. The listeners wasn't, what's the other number? So one's 840. Yeah, 840. So the engaged listeners, what that means is they actually have to listen to either 20 minutes or 40%. So it's actually not fair because that favors the smaller one. So I would ignore that metric. Yeah, but let's look at listeners 840. What's the other one on the longer form? 937. 937. So you're looking at roughly a 10 % difference from the long form to short form for listeners, but you are seeing quite a bit more plays and listening time.

4:07And by the way, this is our very first one. I think we're going to see more compounding over time. It's just the quality of the content, right? The quality of the content, the way I want you to all think about this is one thing that Eric's not showing here is when we look at our podcast episodes, the episodes actually tend to get good traffic for around 45, 60 days from what we're seeing. Yes. The majority is in the first 30 days, but that episode that long form when he shared has only been around for what? Two weeks, max week and a half. So it hasn't even been a full month while the one he compared it to how long has that episode been around?

4:43No, it's, I mean, that was the day before. Oh, okay. So similar. Yep. Yep. So here's how you want to look at it, right? It's if you have high quality content and you put it into a tool like Chartable, it's actually going to show you the retention rate, right? The cohort retention rate. Like if they listen to something really good, what are the odds that they're going to want to come back for the next episode and the next episode? So your job when you're producing content is part of the thing with email marketing is you want people to look forward to the next email. Same thing with your content.

5:11You want people to look forward to your next piece of content, right? I'm going to try to pull up another chart over here, literally from Chartable, no pun intended. and you can see a little retention thing over here. So I'm going to pull this up. Let's do this. And what we're trying to break down is really good because this is apples to apples comparison. Usually people talk about short form versus long form, but everyone has different audiences and people tend to only do either long form or short form. It's very rare that a podcast does both. So we're able to really compare to see how we do versus others.

5:43Yep. So it's already gone past the, let's go over. Yeah, I think we're too far past now. But anyway, here's how you want to look at this, right? A cohort retention chart, if you're reading this on YouTube right now is you're reading each row and each row is an episode. Okay. So, and then each column is like, you know, what percent of them actually returned to watch the next episode. And so this episode over here on how YouTube and Spotify are changing the game, you can see that this one actually performed pretty good relative to the other ones, right? So 66 % will come to the next one, then 33%, than 36%.

6:16What you don't want is you don't want to see like a huge drop-off. And so we know that if we continue to do these types of longer form videos, we're going to see less of a drop-off and we're going to get more people returning. And then our downloads are going to compound more. What's the long form episode one? I'm trying to find it right now. When did we publish? There's so many episodes. The long form one we published over here. We're just doing this in public right now. One second. Oh, okay. So March 25th. March 25th. There are downloads in a while. I'm like, that's pretty good. 50 ,000-ish downloads a day.

6:45Yeah, the thing was broken for a while. Okay, so, and then we'll change this off to over here. Yeah, it's not showing anymore. It only shows like the most recent ones. So anyway, that's that for this episode. We don't want to bore you with all the details here. But point being is we're going to continue to do these longer form ones. We'll probably start to, you know, phase or do less of the short form ones. Yeah. What Eric and I are hoping for is the engagement from the longer form episodes makes people want to listen to more episodes in the future. So we're hoping that's going to be the real winner for us because that's how you keep growing.

7:19If you keep retaining your existing listeners, you'll end up growing much, much more in the future. The issue we have right now is a lot of the content's regurgitated. So we've been fixing that. We've been fixing that with both our short form and long form episodes. But we're curious to see what will happen after a month or two. Well, take a look at this, Neil. So you can see the last two reviews we got on Marketing School were actually favorable for us. So one person said, love the long form content. So thank you to Live Fast. And then this person, Felipe CDMX says, this is my go-to marketing podcast.

7:50So five stars on both. So by the way, if you like the long forms, come leave us a review. And even if you hate it, leave us a review as well. Tell us what we can do better. But if you see this one over here, someone calls bro-y keyword soup. We got a one-star review, right? So we got enough of these one-star ones, all fluff, not useful. It's like, okay, let's take the feedback. Let's figure out how we can get better. So take this episode as an episode of customer development and also analytics, telling the story with analytics to figure out how we can go about being better. Neil, anything else?

8:16That's it. Make sure you rate, review this podcast. We really appreciate it. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool.io. Until next time, class dismissed. We'll see you next time.