My Media Diet: Watching my podcasts

Author: Liv Molho, Strategy Manager, The Goat Agency

Some conversations in this industry feel chronic.

One of those is content formats.

Long-form content, short-form content, podcasts, clips, audio, video, creator-led, celebrity-led. It never ends. There is constantly a new prediction about what audiences want, and every year, everyone scrambles to adjust accordingly.

The conversation feels like the weather: constantly changing, but also somehow always the same.

Something I’ve said before, and stand firmly by, is that YouTube is the Garden of Eden when it comes to influencer content.

It’s the place from which creator content came. Those of us who grew up on YouTube before 2011 know that all too well.

Interestingly, many people now think of YouTube as the home of long-form content. But if you go back and watch some of the platform’s earliest viral hits, a surprising amount of them are under fifteen minutes long. Many are under five.

Over time, YouTube videos got longer. In their prime, they became roughly the length of sitcom episodes. Today, many are significantly longer.

Then came TikTok.

Suddenly, all anyone could talk about was short-form content. Every platform jumped into action. Instagram launched Reels. YouTube launched Shorts. The entire internet seemed to be reorganizing itself around scrolling through increasingly shorter pieces of content.

At the same time, another format was exploding: podcasts.

Suddenly every celebrity had one, every journalist had one, every comedian had one, and every media personality had one.

Audio was also having a moment.

Then something interesting happened: audio and video started converging again.

Today, it feels like almost every major podcast is filmed.

The hosts sit in a studio with cameras, and there are cuts and visual gags that can only be enjoyed if you are watching. Clips get posted across social platforms, while the full episodes are uploaded to YouTube.

And if I’m being honest, I usually prefer watching my podcasts too.

But every time I say that sentence, something about it feels weird.

“Watching my podcasts”

WATCHING my PODCASTS.

Huh? That can’t be right.

It’s like when someone says they read an audiobook.

The other day, while walking my dog, I found myself thinking:

If we are all watching podcasts, are they really podcasts anymore?

And then it hit me.

These aren’t podcasts.

They’re webshows.

WEBSHOWS!

The word felt strangely obvious the second it occurred to me.

Because before YouTube. Before TikTok. Before influencers. Before streaming services. Before podcast networks…

There were webshows.

The early internet was full of them!

Independent creators built audiences through episodic content on Newgrounds, eBaum’s World, personal websites, forums, and countless corners of the internet that hardly exist anymore.

They weren’t TV shows, and they weren’t podcasts. They were simply shows made for the web.

This led me to realize something else…

Maybe we’ve spent twenty years inventing new names for formats that aren’t actually new.

My favorite early YouTube creators were totally making webshows.

Many of today’s biggest podcasts are definitely webshows.

The distinction between audio and video is increasingly blurry.

The distinction between creator content and traditional media is increasingly blurry.

Even the distinction between platforms is becoming less important than it used to be.

For years, we’ve talked endlessly about content evolution as though it’s a straight line. One format is always replacing another, with one trend killing the last.

After two decades of debating long-form versus short-form, audio versus video, creators versus traditional media, we’ve somehow arrived right back where we started:

People making shows for the internet.

Webshows.

The internet’s oldest creative media content format.

There’s something poetic about that.

After all this time and alllll this conversation, we’ve come back to our roots.

In 2026, I think it’s time to bring back calling webshows webshows.

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Listen OR Watch The Goat Agency’s own podcast, Overherd on Social, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.

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