Hidden strategy top creators use to turn clips into 4M+ long-form views
For years, creators assumed short-form content was killing long-form viewership. TikTok’s swipe culture was blamed for collapsing attention spans and pulling viewers away from deeper content. But 2025 made something unmistakably clear: short-form isn’t killing long-form content, it's powering it.
Through video clipping, creators now manufacture demand, engineer outlier episodes, and launch products at scale. What once looked like viewer fragmentation is actually a new distribution strategy. The question of whether to focus on short-form or long-form is no longer relevant, because leading creators now grow by using both formats as a coordinated system, with short-form clips acting as the distribution engine and long-form serving as the conversion layer.
How video clipping increased Jay Shetty's long-form viewership
Jay Shetty, host of "On Purpose" and one of the world’s top podcast creators with over 5M+ subscribers, has become one of the clearest examples of how clipping fuels long-form growth and functions as an advertising vehicle.
An examination of his viewership data reveals two significant long-form spikes in May and late September 2025. Each spike corresponds to episodes fueled by massive clipping ecosystems.
Spike #1
In early May 2025, Jay Shetty experienced a sharp rise in total viewership. The timing corresponds directly with the release of his On Purpose episode featuring Khloé Kardashian on May 5, 2025.
In the days immediately following the episode, 100+ short-form clips flooded Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts across a wide range of clipping channels. Some of the top clips received 8M+ views.
This level of reach and virality suggests a deliberate amplification strategy built for scale and lead generation, not an organic coincidence. The sheer quantity of clips further reinforces how clipping can manufacture hype and pull in macro-level attention back to the main channel.
Clipping not only triggered a surge in Jay Shetty’s long-form podcast views, making this episode one of the most watched in that period and even tripling the view count of an episode featuring Michelle Obama, but it also acted as a strategic acquisition funnel. Within the episode description, a direct link to Khloé’s newly launched brand, Khloud Foods, was embedded.
Khloud was launched on April 29, just six days before the podcast went live. When combined with the spike in long-form viewership, the clipping strategy drove a parallel surge in Google search interest for Khloud Foods, culminating in a reported ~$800K+ in sales during the first week.
Spike #2
The second spike correlates directly to the release of Jay Shetty's podcast episode featuring Emma Watson on September 24, 2025.
Similarly, after this episode aired, it was supported by more than 430+ short-form clips across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, which all funneled back into the parent, long-form episode.
This episode didn’t outperform because of its content alone, it was engineered to. This concentrated distribution of clips effectively elevated the episode above every other upload in the same window, driving it to 4M+ views and turning it into a deliberate outlier.
The playbook
Together, the Khloe Kardashian and Emma Watson episodes show that Jay Shetty’s long-form spikes weren't accidents, but rather they were outcomes of deliberate clipping distribution strategies that clearly outperformed episodes without clipping strategies. Clipping creates long-form winners, concentrates attention on command, and drives real sales. In a landscape where distribution is more powerful than content alone, clipping has become one of the most effective ways to scale long-form content and one of the most powerful advertising systems creators and brands can deploy.