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Three items for you today:
📺 How does podcast clip viewership compare to full episode viewership?
🙋♀️ One question about short-form vs. long-form
🏆 The ongoing creator boom at Cannes Lions
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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Long-form vs. short-form podcast viewership
The 2020s creator economy was forged in social-feed logic: fast, disposable, infinite. But, increasingly, the most durable creator-media businesses resemble television networks (or component parts).
In late 2025, TV officially overtook mobile as the primary screen for YouTube viewership in the U.S., with roughly 60% of American watch time now on television.
To get a clearer sense of how audience behavior and retention shift across formats, I compared viewership across TikTok and YouTube for three top creator video podcasts over a three-month period (March to May 2026).
Short-form video captures attention and serves as top-of-funnel; long-form video converts that attention into habit, ritual, and sustained connection.
Call Her Daddy
The Diary of a CEO
So True with Caleb Hearon
Kareem Rahma and Adam Faze’s hit series Keep the Meter Running began as a short-form, TikTok-native idea, and this month they relaunched it as a long-form show on YouTube. On TikTok, the clips routinely pulled hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes millions.
@keepthemeterrunning 🚨Ramadan Special🚨I hailed a cab in downtown Manhattan and had the pleasure of meeting Mouhamadou, a Muslim taxi driver from Côte d'Ivoire ... See more
With three published episodes, the YouTube version of Keep the Meter Running isn’t yet pulling in TikTok-equivalent views. The first episodes are sitting in the tens of thousands of views, a fraction of what the clips brought in. But, as a platform, YouTube sees a longer tail viewership; the audience transference, if it takes place, will happen over time.
Rahma, in a recent email interview with The Publish Press, said he wanted a two-way relationship with the audience he'd already built, and, as he put it, "YouTube is the people's platform."
The show was featured at YouTube’s Brandcast Upfront in May, presented to advertisers alongside new series from Alex Cooper and Trevor Noah — part of the platform’s pitch that it now "stands alone as the future of media."
“When we made the show the first time, it was only a short-form show, and what was happening under every single video were like ‘where’s the long-form?!’ and we were like, there’s no long-form, there’s no other show, this is the show (…)”
More data reflects this shift:
YouTube pulled in over $60 billion in total revenue in 2025, making it bigger than Netflix and topping the combined ad revenue of Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Roughly $20 billion of this total came from subscriptions (YouTube Premium, Music, TV, NFL Sunday Ticket).
Influencer Marketing Factory's 2026 brand deals report — which analyzed 300,000+ sponsored creator posts across three platforms — found the average brand-creator relationship runs 13.5 months on YouTube, versus 7.7 on Instagram and just 4.9 on TikTok.
Nearly three-quarters of TikTok creator-brand relationships end after a single collaboration; YouTube creators, meanwhile, post a repeat-collaboration rate above 50%.
Have you ever listened to a full podcast after watching clips?
Click one option to let us know what you think. We’ll share the results in next Friday’s newsletter.
Behind the Cannes Lions creator boom
Roughly 50 creators made the trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2022 — barely a footnote at an event that draws tens of thousands of ad executives, CMOs, and agency chiefs to the French Riviera every June.
This year, it's about ten times that, according to Cannes Lions VP and Chief Growth Officer Ed Davidson in a recent interview with The Publish Press. Creators, he says, "have become such a central part of the ecosystems in Cannes: advertising, marketing, media, entertainment, and retail." Or, more bluntly: creators are flocking to Cannes because advertisers are continually flocking to creators.
In 2024, Cannes launched LIONS Creators, its first official creator track. Last year, in 2025, it rebranded the old Social & Influencer Lions as the Social & Creator Lions and added five new subcategories specifically focused on creator work:
Creator Collaboration
Creator-Led Content Strategy
Community Building
Cross-Platform Storytelling
Excellence in Craft.
For a creator, going to Cannes is like going to a sales conference — a week where the people who control the ad industry's budgets are all in one place, and the entire point is to walk away with relationships that turn into deals. Getting into that room is expensive, though, and figuring out who actually pays for it is the real game.
How are creators paying for it?
Brandon Smithwick, content strategist and creator of Content to Commas, is attending the festival for his second time (this year as a Cannes Lions partner).
By his count, roughly 80% of creators going this year paid for their own flights and accommodations, then recouped it through brand partnerships — typically $1K–$5K deals, since most brands no longer have the budget to cover travel outright.
His advice cuts against creator instinct:
Stop chasing the Delta/Amex/Meta logos (brands see through it)
Focus on small and mid-sized companies where you can actually build a relationship
Lock in those deals before June so you're already top of mind
Pitch brands fully-formed ideas — street interviews, executive sit-downs, behind-the-scenes coverage — rather than asking them to figure out a use for you.
