We are in a clip-ocalypse. Steven Goldstein wrote an excellent blog post about this today, and I was coincidentally working on a blog post about the same topic (will be released ASAP but required some edits after reading Steven's piece). He talks about how many of his students will watch a few clips from a podcast episode, feel they've gotten the gist of the episode, and not feel the need to go seek out the entire episode. And they consider this "watching the podcast". Totally agree that this is a huge trend right now. I wrote a little while back about how my little sister told me she "watched Love Island," only to find out that she only watches the clips posted on TikTok. I think brands are seeing this trend and interpreting it as meaning that the clips are the only part of their podcast that matter. They need to make an entire video podcast, but only for those 30 second clips that they can post to LinkedIn. I think the more important thing that needs investigating with this trend is WHY people are only watching the clips and not moving over the full episodes. I don't think it's because they don't have the attention spans for long-form content. Podcasts regularly get 80% or more completion rates. People will binge-watch 50 clips from the same podcast. I honestly think the answer for why we are in an epidemic of clipped content is because the actual content that is being clipped is bad. (Sorry for the hot take, I feel it is important to be blunt here.) Most of these podcasts that are being clipped are hardly edited at all. These Twitch streams that are clipped can literally be 8-hours long. This is a huge amount of content, and the vast majority of it is boring. Of course people aren't moving over to watch the full episodes of your 3-hour long conversational podcast. That podcast episode was created without the audience in mind at all. It was created specifically to become a clip farm! The actual podcast episode is practically irrelevant. As Steven says, it's the raw material. Who wants to watch the raw material? Maybe if more podcasters spent a little more time editing their show down, considering the audience's experience, and making it less of an ego-driven rambly romp, more people would stick around and listen to full episodes instead of just watching the clips. There is value in building an audience of clip watchers on social media. But there is also value in building an audience for your long-form podcast episodes. Podcasts allow depth, relationship building, long-term and sustained loyalty. Clips are ephemeral. They're scrolled past without a passing thought. Clips give you reach, but podcasts give you trust. Interpreting this trend as meaning that clips are all you should care about, because that's all that the audience cares about, is misguided. They are open to consuming long-form content. Your long-form content just sucks. https://lnkd.in/gRTcRbSc | 26 comments on LinkedIn