Almost every church posts video every week. More than half have never cut a single clip out of it. Here is what the numbers looked like.
Data collected Sunday, September 13, 2026. Method at the bottom.
A manufacturer films a plant tour once a year. An association records a conference in the spring and maybe a webinar in the fall. A church makes a brand-new 60 to 90 minute video every seven days, and three quarters of the ones we looked at had it online before dinner.
The content is already made. That is what makes the next number strange.
Not "a few." Zero. That is 57% of churches producing an hour of video a week and cutting nothing out of it.
The median service video in the group drew 183 views. Not because the preaching is bad, but because a 75-minute recording is the wrong shape for how people find things now. Nobody scrolling on a Tuesday night taps a 75-minute video from a church they have never heard of.
For each channel with at least one Short, we compared its best-performing Short against a recent, typical service video from the same channel.
| Channels with at least one Short | 25 |
|---|---|
| Short beat the service video | 24 |
| Median gap | 5.3x |
| Widest gap | 32x |
Same church. Same message. Same audience. One format reached five times as many people as the other.
And most of those channels stopped. A handful of Shorts last spring, then nothing.
It is not laziness. Nobody owns it. The comms team is one person, sometimes half a person. The video is the tech volunteer's job. The clips would be somebody's job, if anybody had been handed it. So the service goes up whole, and the week rolls on, and Sunday comes again.
The work is not editing. Editing is the easy part. The work is deciding which 45 seconds out of 75 minutes is the one, and then doing it again next week when you are tired.
Paste your channel and get the same comparison for your own videos: median full-length views, your best Short, and the gap between them. Free, instant, nothing stored.
Check your channel58 church channels, read on September 13, 2026. Upload cadence came from each channel's public RSS feed. View counts were read from the channels' own public pages. We compared each channel's best Short against a typical recent full-length video, which is deliberately not an average-to-average comparison: it shows the ceiling, what the best 45 seconds of a week can do next to the whole thing. Channels whose numbers could not be read were excluded rather than estimated. No private data, no analytics access, nothing that is not visible to any visitor.