Why YouTube Long-Form Videos Are the Evergreen Asset Your App Needs

Most B2C apps focus their influencer marketing on short-form content: TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. The logic makes sense—short videos are easier to produce, cheaper to sponsor, and get results quickly.

But there's a case for thinking longer term.

Barak Glanz, CMO of Coddy, built his company to $1M ARR primarily through short-form influencer marketing. But on a recent episode of the Levels Podcast, he shared why he's increasingly excited about long-form YouTube content—despite it being significantly harder to measure.

The reason? Long-form videos are evergreen assets that continue delivering users for years after publication, functioning more like SEO than traditional advertising.

Short-Form Content: Fast Results, Short Lifespan

When Coddy first started scaling through influencer marketing, they focused almost entirely on short-form video platforms. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts became their primary channels for acquiring new users.

The appeal of short-form content is obvious: results come quickly. A video gets posted, views spike within days, and you can measure conversions within a week or two. For a startup trying to hit growth targets and prove channel effectiveness, this fast feedback loop is invaluable.

But short-form content also has a predictable decay curve. Most videos get the majority of their views in the first few days after posting. After a couple of weeks, view counts drop dramatically. Within a month or two, most short-form videos are essentially dead, generating minimal ongoing traffic.

This creates a treadmill effect. To maintain consistent user acquisition, you need to continuously produce new content or sponsor new influencer posts. The moment you stop, growth stops.

The Evergreen Nature of Long-Form YouTube

Long-form YouTube videos operate on a completely different timeline. Rather than spiking and dying, they can accumulate views steadily over months or years.

Barak explained the shift in Coddy's strategy:

"Recently, in the past few months, we started experimenting more and more with long form videos on YouTube. And it works really, really well for us. It's just really hard for us to estimate how much money we're going to see back."

The comparison he drew to SEO is apt:

"YouTube is also like, marketing people call it evergreen. It's like when you do an ad on YouTube, it's like an asset that stays there for years gathering more views, more customers. So it's like a longer term investment."

Unlike short-form content that requires constant production, a single well-performing long-form YouTube video can deliver users continuously. It ranks in YouTube search results, gets recommended by the algorithm to relevant viewers, and builds cumulative value over time.

For B2C apps with limited marketing budgets, this evergreen property is incredibly attractive. You're not renting attention—you're building assets.

The Measurement Challenge

The downside? Long-form content is significantly harder to measure, especially in the short term.

Coddy's CoolScript 2 algorithm, which predicts influencer ROI with impressive accuracy for short-form content, doesn't work for long-form videos:

"Cool script 2 works only for short form videos."

The problem is that ROI models designed for short-term payback don't capture the extended value of evergreen content. A long-form video might generate modest returns in its first month, making it look like a poor investment. But over 12-24 months, as it continues accumulating views, the same video could deliver 10x the initial return.

Traditional attribution windows—7 days, 30 days, even 90 days—don't capture this dynamic. You need to track performance over multiple quarters or years to truly understand ROI, which makes real-time optimization nearly impossible.

This measurement gap creates a dilemma for data-driven marketers. How do you allocate budget between channels when one (short-form) is measurable but ephemeral, while the other (long-form) is valuable but opaque?

A Real-World Example: Campfire

Jason, one of the podcast hosts, shared his own experience with YouTube's evergreen effect from his first company, Campfire, a writing software tool:

"We started doing YouTube videos like crazy back in like 2019, 2020, 2021, and we still get a huge percentage of our new users coming from these YouTubers that we haven't even sponsored in like three years."

This perfectly illustrates the power of the evergreen effect. Videos produced years ago, with no ongoing investment, continue delivering users in 2024 and 2025. The cumulative value of those campaigns vastly exceeds what the short-term measurements would have suggested.

For startups, this creates interesting strategic questions about budget allocation. If you have limited marketing dollars, do you invest in channels that show immediate ROI, or do you invest in building evergreen assets that might not pay off for quarters or years?

Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term

The answer, for most companies, is probably both.

Short-form content provides the immediate growth and feedback loops that early-stage companies need. It proves channel effectiveness, generates case studies for investors, and creates momentum. The fast attribution cycles let you iterate quickly on messaging, creator selection, and content formats.

Long-form content builds sustainable acquisition infrastructure. It reduces dependence on continuous spending and creates compounding returns over time. As your library of evergreen videos grows, so does your baseline user acquisition—even without additional investment.

Barak's approach with Coddy reflects this balance. They built the business on short-form content because it was measurable and fast-moving. Now that they have product-market fit and consistent revenue, they're investing more heavily in long-form content despite the measurement challenges.

What Makes Long-Form Content Work

Not all long-form YouTube content delivers evergreen results. The videos that perform well over time tend to share certain characteristics:

Educational Value Videos that teach something concrete—how to solve a problem, how to use a tool, how to understand a concept—have longer shelf lives than entertainment-focused content. Someone searching "how to learn Python" in 2027 will find the same videos relevant as someone searching in 2024.

Search Optimization Long-form videos need to be discoverable through search to accumulate views over time. This means optimizing titles, descriptions, and tags for keywords that potential users actually search for, not just clever marketing copy.

Comprehensive Coverage Longer videos (10-30 minutes) that thoroughly cover a topic tend to rank better and get recommended more consistently than surface-level overviews. YouTube's algorithm favors watch time, so videos that keep viewers engaged for longer perform better.

Authentic Integration Product mentions need to feel natural within the video's content rather than tacked on as sponsorships. The most effective long-form videos integrate the product as part of the solution to the problem being addressed.

For Coddy, this likely means sponsoring content creators who make coding tutorials, programming education videos, or developer career content—contexts where mentioning a code-learning platform fits organically.

When to Start Investing in Long-Form

The timing question matters. Should early-stage startups invest in long-form YouTube content, or wait until they're more established?

Barak's journey suggests waiting might be wise. Coddy first proved their model with measurable, fast-feedback channels. Only after reaching $1M ARR and proving product-market fit did they shift focus toward long-term asset building.

The logic makes sense: if you're still figuring out messaging, target audience, and product positioning, you need fast feedback loops to iterate. Long-form content's slow payback makes it a poor tool for learning.

But once you've validated your approach and have consistent revenue to sustain operations, building evergreen assets becomes increasingly attractive. The companies that start early enough gain compound advantages over time.

Key Takeaways

• Long-form YouTube videos function like SEO for user acquisition, delivering consistent traffic for years after publication unlike short-form content's quick decay
• Traditional ROI measurement tools designed for short-form content don't capture the extended value of evergreen assets—you need multi-year tracking
• Short-form content provides fast feedback and immediate growth, while long-form builds sustainable acquisition infrastructure
• Educational content optimized for search queries has the longest shelf life and highest evergreen value
• Early-stage startups should prioritize measurable short-form channels, then shift toward long-form once product-market fit is proven
• A balanced approach using both short and long-form content maximizes both immediate growth and compounding long-term returns

Listen to the full conversation with Barak Glanz on the Levels Podcast to hear more about Coddy's evolution from short-form focus to building evergreen acquisition assets.