I’m increasingly seeing short videos replacing actual written articles. Not complementing, “replacing”. And I’m not a fan of it.
I can’t skim a video. With all the content out there on the Internet that I’m aching to consume, I don’t have time to watch even a 60 second video. I currently have 11,162 unread items in my RSS reader. Now, granted, I’ve become pretty good at filtering out what I don’t care about. I drop feeds I don’t read and skim through the feeds I do for information that interests me. (Sifting through the noise can be a whole new post, I thnk!) But when I click through to the website, if necessary, and I’m presented with a video, I’m just annoyed. If I *know* it’s a video, I’m actually less likely to visit the site.
Online video certainly has its place. I frequently visit YouTube with my 5 year old and watch videos of sharks. I’ve watched a TV show or two online, although I normally download them. I’ve looked for video content of “how to” do some hardware repairs. But in all of these cases I’m seeking the video out, not being bombarded with it upon entry to a site.
What do you think?
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I couldn’t agree with this more. Video is not the best way to present most technical content. I have no problem reading RSS feeds during downtime at work, but heading over to YouTube and wasting bandwidth seems like an abuse of resources.
I think videos can be extremely useful for explaining certain processes and concepts (the CommonCraft videos come to mind) but they shouldn’t, as you say, replace text. If I wanted to watch a TV show…
I agree that video should not be the whole post. They should at least put the text transcript of the video in the post, or do a summary of what the video contains. Isn’t text the king of SEO? Aren’t they going to lose out on some traffic by just having a video? Just wondering…