Long Form Content is Dead with Nico Lagan

Josh (00:00:02) - We got five minutes on the clock. What is your name in the name of your podcast show?

Nico (00:00:07) - It's simple. Nickelodeon, the Nico login show.

Josh (00:00:10) - Nice. All right. What are we going to talk today? What do podcasters need to know about podcasting? Starting, growing, monetizing.

Nico (00:00:18) - Long form content is dying, if not dead. If I record a podcast now, I don't even record it as a full interview. I really see it as a bunch of reels put together. This is oh yeah, like I've been creating content for about four years, give or take. I probably recorded 300 podcasts of my own, and I've been a guest on probably, I would say 70 over the past ten weeks, give or take. And I went from a year ago, I probably had 10,000 views a month on all social media combined. Right now, I average between 5 to 10 million a month. I post probably just today. I think I've posted three for probably four reels since this morning. I'll post another one as soon as we're done here, and I'll post another one before I go to bed.

Nico (00:01:09) - And this is all original content, like it's all stuff I make. And yeah, when I do podcasts now, like I did a podcast with a priest not too long ago with a pastor and I asked him 27 questions. I sat down, we sat down for an hour and a half. All I did is here's a question, recorded it as an interview, and I'm turning into every single one and two reels. And this is how I see content nowadays. Because if you consider that the average human being has an attention span of about 8.25 seconds. So and it has dropped over the past 20 years, it has dropped by 30% like it used to be 12. Now it's like 25. So we're really in a world where reels is king. If you look everywhere on social media, every single algorithm out there, for the exception of Facebook and LinkedIn, LinkedIn promotes long form content like written content. Facebook promotes everything from picture long videos, reels like it likes written content, it likes everything. But if you look at Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, they mostly promote reels or short form content.

Nico (00:02:18) - YouTube has a bit of a difference because it's an education site, right? That's how they make the most of their views is with longer form content. But if you consider the attention span, the attention span, sorry, most people will not discover your podcast and listen to the whole hour 30 minutes right off the bat. You know, it's like in marketing, they tell you that it takes seven points of contact before somebody buys your product. If you're a podcaster, your product is your podcast. You're the product, your podcast is your product. So in order for somebody to listen to an hour of your content, chances are they'll have to interact with seven pieces of your content. Can you imagine that? They have to listen to a minute of every single of seven different podcasts, when you can simply start looking at your podcasts, as in, I will run for an hour, I will expect ten. I will wrap my podcast in a way where I know I can ask ten questions that will produce ten answers, that I can either turn into 1 or 2 reels per question, or even one 3 to 5 minute video per question.

Nico (00:03:21) - So you can literally I see I see podcasts as a real machine. This is how I see it now.

Josh (00:03:28) - Wow. So what was the day that that, like, clicked in your head? Because you went from a certain point in social media to blowing it out of the water into the millions of views, like, what was that like? Oh my God, we should be doing this. What was that point?

Nico (00:03:44) - It's just the amount of views. So a lot of the things that I speak about is not liked by algorithm. So if you look at YouTube, YouTube absolutely hates me. I can barely do between 100 to 200,000 views a month, and this is the maximum I'll ever make. They hate my long form content and I notice I can I can make reels super easy reels. I'll get 4 or 5, six, 10,000 views on it. I'll launch a podcast that that's an hour long that took my guys for that eight, ten hours to produce outside of me having to go face to face, recorded, find guest and all that stuff, I'll get a few thousand views on it.

Nico (00:04:22) - I have a I have a video I made on off my phone. Literally, I started recording blah blah blah blah. I changed the angles because I'm so used to it, so it makes it very dynamic. When I'm speaking. I think I'm crossing 120,000 views in the past two days, and I have about 10,000 likes, probably 2000 comments. It literally took me 30 minutes because there's animations that I've put in off my phone, but I literally did everything off of my phone.

Josh (00:04:52) - You got 10s left. Where can people go to listen to your podcast show.

Nico (00:04:56) - At Real Niko Lagoon? Everywhere? Absolutely every. I post on about eight different platform every day. So.

Josh (00:05:02) - Cool. And we did this all in under five minutes. Guys, I hope you're enjoying this podcast show. It's for you for podcasters out there looking to grow, monetize your show. See you.