📱 The Long & The Short Of It

In this week's P.O. Box:

Grow Your Audience to 1 Million Subs with this One Simple Trick!

I'm not sure if that title actually exists out there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

If you spend any time on social media, you've likely noticed an arm's race with short-form content. Regardless of industry, creators, brands, and businesses are trying to hockey-stick their follower counts by pumping out non-stop shorts, TikToks, reels, and whatever they call it on the site where your uncle continues to share links to deep state conspiracies.

I've always enjoyed posting clips and highlights from my long-form shows and podcasts, but I didn't really take this seriously as a "growth strategy" until I started surveying the landscape toward the end of last year and began wondering if I was getting left behind.

I watched Nick Ercolano moonshot his BDGE Tiktok from a few thousand followers to hundreds of thousands thanks to a lunch guessing game.

I watched Jack Settleman take his previously neglected Snapback Sports YouTube account from a few thousand subs to over 600,000 thanks entirely to a blitz of viral short-form content (note to self: post more mascot content).

Which makes it all the more interesting that they both recently got together to discuss why short-form content is "destroying your brand" on their show Big Content (a good watch/listen for creators, btw).

A YouTuber named Raffiti drew a similar conclusion in a recent video where he outlined the fall of short-form content. The TLDR:

• Social media platforms haven't found good ways to monetize short-form content because it's hard to get swipe-happy users to stop and watch an ad. Meta (ah, that's the name I was looking for earlier) suspended their creator fund, TikTok monetization is nearly impossible, and the revenue from YouTube shorts is comically small.

• The overall quality of short-form content is poor because creators are chasing quick growth with hurried work

• Short-form is stealing attention away from long-form and the platforms haven't figured out how to create synergy between the two

• Audiences grown from short-form content are completely segmented from the long-form audience under the same channel umbrella:

It's easy to get lost in the sauce of "vanity metrics," a term Jack and Nick both use to describe the follower growth they achieved via short-form content. And it's not surprising that they both have grown disillusioned to what that number ultimately means for them.

Nick essentially had to restructure his entire company because their growth on TikTok wasn't generating any revenue for their main business (for those not deep in the weeds, this became a huge viral gossip topic on TikTok after Nick laid off two employees. I recommend listening to him explain it, rather than TikTok NPCs, if you are curious to know more about what happened).

Despite all this, it does seem likely that the platforms will eventually find a way for short- and long-form content to work more harmoniously in tandem with each other. Their success depends on it. Until then, it can be difficult to know what to focus on as a creator.

It's funny that short-form vs. long-form has become such a hot topic in the content space because a very similar debate has played out in the improv world for years.

Short-form improv (think Whose Line Is It Anyway?) has a high success rate. The games are structured and the rules are well defined. And as long as you have solid performers, it's not hard to generate consistent laughs.

Long-form improv (think ASSSCAT monologues or Middleditch and Schwartz on Netflix), however, is more like putting on an improvised play with multiple acts, thematic through lines, and recurring characters. It presents an entirely different set of challenges and can be a tightrope walk where the highs are very high and the lows are painfully, excruciatingly low. This is where I could theoretically link to a video of some old improv show I did, but I'm not enough of a masochist to do that. A photo will have to do:

A lot of theaters wrestle with this programming dilemma and often elect to showcase short-form content in the primetime weekend slots in order to ensure the audience gets a good show. On the flip side, they'll banish the long-form shows to mid-week shadow realm slots knowing these have a much higher likelihood of flopping.

The problem, though, is that short-form improv is pretty boring for the performer from a creative stand point. It quickly becomes very formulaic and you find yourself craving the unknown possibilities of where a long-form show could end up.

Short-form audiences churn, too. It's a date night activity for people looking for something to do. Good long-form troupes, however, attract a loyal audience that will often return week after week to watch the same team of improvisers perform.

I think a lot about the type of audience I "want" or am "cultivating" with my content. I love dicking around on long best ball streams and making inside jokes about WR avalanches and piss boys, but that's also not a very welcoming environment for someone who might have stumbled across the channel for the first time.

It's why I've started making a concerted effort to create some more "approachable" (overusing scare quotes is my "toxic trait," I'm working on it) shorts content in the form of Best Ball Tips that could potentially introduce more people to my streams.

It makes for a weird dynamic, though. Most of my core audience—aka the sickos firing up Best Ball Breakfast on a Monday morning in March—already know about the importance of letting a draft come to you or avoiding expensive stacks, so it feels almost counter-intuitive to be making content that isn't for them. But I've been trying to balance these out with some more overtly comedic shorts that the channel O.G.s will also enjoy.

I certainly don't have everything figured out and I continue to experiment with all formats of content, whether that's live streams with friends, a highly produced video about becoming an engagement farmer, or a quick and dirty short about entering way too many slow drafts.

Some stuff I do is extremely high effort, other stuff is an easy lift. Ultimately, I like variety.

Over at Fantasy Life, I'm constantly hopping between writing the newsletter, making shorts, hosting radio shows, fielding questions in a Discord AMAs, and even developing some cool new projects that will soon see the light of day.

I'm kind of just banking on the fact that if I mostly continue to optimize for 1) creating content that I really enjoy making and 2) engaging directly with the people who enjoy consuming it, the rest will work itself out in the long run.

If I went full bore on one thing, I could probably accelerate growth and hang my hat on a vanity metric, but that process would be very boring to me, result in burnout, and limit the time I'm able to spend doing things I truly enjoy, like chopping it up with the Deposit Kingdom commuuuuuunity.

The algorithms will keep changing and the social platforms will come and go, so I figure that I might as well make shit I like, regardless of the format.

Now if you could please forward this newsletter to a friend, I'd really like to get to 1,000 subs.

🍳 2 final shots at $200,000. We fired two final Best Ball Breakfast bullets at the Big Board contest on Monday's stream before the contest filled. I'm now in slow draft hell.

💡 Best ball tips. The stack I always try to prioritize.

💦 What do we do with Lamar Jackson? Spags and I broke down his trade request on Splash Play.

🚢 Dynasty rookie mock draft. We hosted a 12-team mock draft on Ship Chasing this week with guests JJ Zachariason , Ron Stewart, and Blair Andrews. People got triggered by my use of Google Sheets.

💔 I'm ready to get hurt by Trey Lance again. Tried to make sense of the Niners messy QB situation for Fantasy Life.

💪 I truly do not know how to describe this week's Swolecast. But there was a show.

👾 Chat GPT hacks. Of course Andy8052 is using ChatGPT to code up chrome extensions for Underdog.

👿 A QB thief ruins a draft. Tried to draft a best ball team with Dwain McFarland, but a rogue, QB-lovin' drafter made it nearly impossible.

It was fun watching you all weigh in on the 5-10-25 prop bet challenge I am cooking up with Patrick Laird, although some of you have very little faith in me:

Responses were generally all over the map, although something of a consensus line emerged around -3:

I'm still in talks with Laird (he asked to see my pull-up form) and hopefully we can nail something down soon.

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