Is Long-Form Dead? 29 of 48 Marketers Say No

Shorts carry 51% of all the YouTube views I counted across 48 marketers. If you only read that number, long-form looks finished.

So I counted the people instead of the views.

29 of the 48 get more than half their views from videos over ten minutes. Only 12 get more than half from shorts.

The full breakdown is in the main count of 34,088 videos. This piece is about those 29.

Why the total lies a little

The 12 shorts-heavy accounts include the giants. Alex Hormozi, Gary Vaynerchuk, Colin and Samir. Nine of the 12 have more than 100 million views.

The 29 long-form people are smaller on average. Only two of them pass 100 million: Simon Sinek and Iman Gadzhi. Together the 29 hold 22% of all the views.

So the total tells you what the biggest accounts do. The count of people tells you what most marketers do.

The typical marketer on this list gets 63% of their views from videos over ten minutes.

The most long-form of all

Three people get 98% or more from long videos:

• Lenny Rachitsky, 99%
• Jay Clouse, 98%
• Joanna Wiebe, 98%

And Iman Gadzhi has 244 million views with three shorts. 93% of his views come from long videos.

The ones who live on other people's channels

Ten of the 48 get less than 10% of their views on their own channel. Eight of those ten are in the long-form group: Seth Godin, Rory Sutherland, Mark Ritson, Marty Neumeier, Justin Welsh, Dan Kennedy, Amy Porterfield and Harry Dry.

Views on other people's channels are a floor, since I only count videos that name the person. So for these eight, the real numbers are probably higher, not lower.

One reading: when somebody else hosts you, it is often a long conversation or a talk. That fits the data. It does not prove it.

So, is long-form dead?

Not for most of these people. Shorts are big because a few accounts make a lot of them. Long videos are where the majority quietly get watched.

Both things are true at once, which is the annoying part. A headline number will only ever tell you one of them.

So what does this have to do with you?

If you are deciding what to make, an industry average is a weak guide. What your actual competitors get watched for is a much stronger one.

Pick one competitor and see what is already working for them. The first benchmark is free: one domain, measured against you, no card and no call. Check your competitor.