If your listeners are frustrated with long episodes of your podcast, the best thing you can do is listen to them. Make your episodes shorter AND more engaging!!! The right way to end an episode is always with listeners wanting more, not saying, "Wheew... That was a lot!" A report from Convince and Convert shows that over 50% of podcast listeners say that episodes are too long. As podcasters who focus on serving our listeners, we need to listen to this and check the completion rates of our own episodes; where are the drop-offs happening? That's an indication of how long your episodes need to be. Focus on improving your own craft by saying LESS on your podcast to better serve your listeners!

I figured an episode of 30 minutes was a better compromise in comparison to my 1 hour and more episodes. As a result, the message is concise, you don't bore your listeners (although I don't think I'm boring even after 30 minutes) and you leave them wanting more. An additional benefit is it can allow you to do an episode topic in parts, which is what I've done and my listeners have said they love.

Look at your analytics. See exactly at what point are listeners dropping off or picking back up. Break the episode in the parts and leave a cliff hanger to the next episode. And maybe you need new listeners if your content must stay at that length.

If the content you want to create is long form and needs more time to flesh out ideas, it may be worth creating shorter "clips" of longer episodes so those who prefer shorter form content can still consume your podcast ecosystem without listening to whole episodes. But IMO if you grew a podcast audience by making episodes long, if you suddenly make it short you may inadvertently lose the magic of how your podcast grew in it's following

The short answer is: shorten your episodes. If your audience complains about it, you should listen. Otherwise, the same rule for nearly all content pieces is true: as long as necessary, as short as possible. But don’t fall into the social media trap. Podcast are long form content, so take advantage of it.