If you want to yap about something long, you will have much more success getting people to click on a Youtube video than text content published elsewhere. Especially if you already have a large subscriber base in the first place, Youtube is where his audience is, and once his audience clicks it the algorithm will keep spreading it even further.
A couple years ago I wrote a very long text essay about some controversy surrounding a niche game I play. It got a small handful of clicks within the community for that game, but that was it. A few years later, some more news developed, and I decided to do a half-remake half-followup in video format. It was very minimally edited because I don’t actually know shit about video editing, in fact I literally did most of it in Google Slides. But I knew that putting it on Youtube would result in significantly more exposure no matter how amateurish it was. Ended up taking off really well, 29k views, which is about 27k more than the text version got.
And I was a nobody publishing my first video. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and in the 9 hours since this video went up, it’s at 337k views. Seems like this Youtube thing is working out well for him.
People generally prefer audio-visual content more than reading.
That’s because people are generally fucking morons who can’t, or worse, won’t fuckin’ read.
Bring on the downvotes. I don’t give a fuck. It’s been proven without a shadow of a doubt that watching things makes you more passive and digest less information than reading. I understand some things make more sense to share in a video format (like a how-to video showing how to fix something) but someone just talking at a camera is not one of them.
Maybe if we stopped enabling the fucking neanderthals among us the world wouldn’t be in such a shitty place as it already is.
haha look, I love reading and writing (and wished the whole world did, too), but either way if you need to deliver a message to as many people as possible, then you need to meet them where they’re at. In the case of advocacy work, it’s irresponsible to try to do everything on your own terms without considering your audience’s needs and preferences.
As for why people prefer videos and audio? Some guesses: its less effort, people have been conditioned through tiktok / short form content to keep consuming from the content machine, the growth of the attention economy, etc. Honestly I feel more pity than I do contempt.
And it needs to be said - meeting people “where they are” instead of making them be better is generally how we’ve gotten into such a horrible place in the FIRST place. “People like SaaS because it’s easier and they don’t care if things go away. They accept it.”
Maybe, just maybe, we should stop letting people dig themselves into comfortable holes and then try to lure them back out via new tunnels. Call them out on crawling into the holes in the first place.
Also, Snot Flickerman, while being excessively confrontational, is not wrong. 21% of US adults are considered functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of the remaining 79% aren’t able to read the MEANING beyond a literal understanding, and I’m sorry, this is a problem to be dealt with, not an expression of neurodiversity - audio/visual stimulation DOES NOT stimulate the same critical thinking centers of the brain. It just does NOT. There are DECADES of research on this.
And this is BEFORE we consider that uploading video to Youtube is putting information EXCLUSIVELY into the hands of a multi-billion dollar company that is NOT on your side and can shut it down for any reason they choose, removing it from the collective consciousness. You can copy and paste and move text around wherever you want. You CANNOT do the same with video. This is a memory hole. There are consequences to this. If you don’t SEE them, that’s a problem.
Honestly, I think it’s because search results for web articles are so poisoned by SEO spam that people turn to YouTube for information even when they would otherwise prefer it to be textual rather than video.
I’d say a large part of why this format is so successful is because there’s a large audience of people who just want something to listen to while they’re doing other activities. Text asks for the reader’s undivided attention, which honestly does make it harder to get that attention.
There’s also just the fact that, like, there isn’t a good platform for text content to reach viewers the way that Youtube does. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and not only does that mean it’s reaching those 413k users, after those subscribers click it the algorithm will continue to push it even further into the feeds of people who aren’t already subscribed. A lot of people are first learning about SKG through seeing these Youtube videos pop up on their feed. Where could Ross even try to publish text content that would get anywhere close to that kind of reach? Nothing remotely like that exists for text, and probably never would.
You can be grumpy and shake your cane at a sign of changing times, but remember what the purpose of this is. Ross needs to reach as wide of an audience as he can if he wants SKG to succeed. Putting it in a format that is more digestible, on a platform where people actively seek this type of content, will reach more viewers. Which will in turn lead to more support for SKG.
Do you want the movement to succeed, or do you want to sit here and hate on video content?
There is more to information than reach. Youtube is a single point of failure. If Google decides to shut down his channel, his material is gone. It’s a memory hole. It’s been pulled out of the collective consciousness. Text can be replicated easily and anywhere. Not even the wayback machine can back up video with any consistent reliability. People FEEL like they’re fighting the power with youtube, but it’s the easiest possible way to shut down information, because normal people cannot host video.
Also, Europe is 745 million people, the vast majority of which do not speak English as a first language. They are the ones who need to see this. This video has ONE set of auto-generated subtitles. If I’m a Pole, I can translate your text by machine. It’s not ideal, but it WORKS. What is the majority of Europe supposed to do with this?
And before you say “everyone in Europe speaks multiple languages”, that is NOT something you can rely on. It’s a selection bias - most of the people you interact with in Europe speak English so you get the idea everyone does, cutting off the huge percentage who do not. They need information too. They still vote.
Unpopular opinion but setting up a whole recording studio and cutting a video without fucking up a bunch is a lot more fucking work than just writing a damn text document.
Why does he feel that it’s necessary to present the information by talking into a webcam? What’s wrong with publishing text?
He’s presenting information to his audience, where his audience is.
If you want to yap about something long, you will have much more success getting people to click on a Youtube video than text content published elsewhere. Especially if you already have a large subscriber base in the first place, Youtube is where his audience is, and once his audience clicks it the algorithm will keep spreading it even further.
A couple years ago I wrote a very long text essay about some controversy surrounding a niche game I play. It got a small handful of clicks within the community for that game, but that was it. A few years later, some more news developed, and I decided to do a half-remake half-followup in video format. It was very minimally edited because I don’t actually know shit about video editing, in fact I literally did most of it in Google Slides. But I knew that putting it on Youtube would result in significantly more exposure no matter how amateurish it was. Ended up taking off really well, 29k views, which is about 27k more than the text version got.
And I was a nobody publishing my first video. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and in the 9 hours since this video went up, it’s at 337k views. Seems like this Youtube thing is working out well for him.
I run a blog (not linking it here on this account), and I experienced the exact same thing as you.
People generally prefer audio-visual content more than reading. Why else would audiobooks take off as well as they did?
That’s because people are generally fucking morons who can’t, or worse, won’t fuckin’ read.
Bring on the downvotes. I don’t give a fuck. It’s been proven without a shadow of a doubt that watching things makes you more passive and digest less information than reading. I understand some things make more sense to share in a video format (like a how-to video showing how to fix something) but someone just talking at a camera is not one of them.
Maybe if we stopped enabling the fucking neanderthals among us the world wouldn’t be in such a shitty place as it already is.
haha look, I love reading and writing (and wished the whole world did, too), but either way if you need to deliver a message to as many people as possible, then you need to meet them where they’re at. In the case of advocacy work, it’s irresponsible to try to do everything on your own terms without considering your audience’s needs and preferences.
As for why people prefer videos and audio? Some guesses: its less effort, people have been conditioned through tiktok / short form content to keep consuming from the content machine, the growth of the attention economy, etc. Honestly I feel more pity than I do contempt.
Less effort, at the cost of WAY more time.
And it needs to be said - meeting people “where they are” instead of making them be better is generally how we’ve gotten into such a horrible place in the FIRST place. “People like SaaS because it’s easier and they don’t care if things go away. They accept it.”
Maybe, just maybe, we should stop letting people dig themselves into comfortable holes and then try to lure them back out via new tunnels. Call them out on crawling into the holes in the first place.
Also, Snot Flickerman, while being excessively confrontational, is not wrong. 21% of US adults are considered functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of the remaining 79% aren’t able to read the MEANING beyond a literal understanding, and I’m sorry, this is a problem to be dealt with, not an expression of neurodiversity - audio/visual stimulation DOES NOT stimulate the same critical thinking centers of the brain. It just does NOT. There are DECADES of research on this.
And this is BEFORE we consider that uploading video to Youtube is putting information EXCLUSIVELY into the hands of a multi-billion dollar company that is NOT on your side and can shut it down for any reason they choose, removing it from the collective consciousness. You can copy and paste and move text around wherever you want. You CANNOT do the same with video. This is a memory hole. There are consequences to this. If you don’t SEE them, that’s a problem.
Honestly, I think it’s because search results for web articles are so poisoned by SEO spam that people turn to YouTube for information even when they would otherwise prefer it to be textual rather than video.
I’d say a large part of why this format is so successful is because there’s a large audience of people who just want something to listen to while they’re doing other activities. Text asks for the reader’s undivided attention, which honestly does make it harder to get that attention.
There’s also just the fact that, like, there isn’t a good platform for text content to reach viewers the way that Youtube does. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and not only does that mean it’s reaching those 413k users, after those subscribers click it the algorithm will continue to push it even further into the feeds of people who aren’t already subscribed. A lot of people are first learning about SKG through seeing these Youtube videos pop up on their feed. Where could Ross even try to publish text content that would get anywhere close to that kind of reach? Nothing remotely like that exists for text, and probably never would.
You can be grumpy and shake your cane at a sign of changing times, but remember what the purpose of this is. Ross needs to reach as wide of an audience as he can if he wants SKG to succeed. Putting it in a format that is more digestible, on a platform where people actively seek this type of content, will reach more viewers. Which will in turn lead to more support for SKG.
Do you want the movement to succeed, or do you want to sit here and hate on video content?
There is more to information than reach. Youtube is a single point of failure. If Google decides to shut down his channel, his material is gone. It’s a memory hole. It’s been pulled out of the collective consciousness. Text can be replicated easily and anywhere. Not even the wayback machine can back up video with any consistent reliability. People FEEL like they’re fighting the power with youtube, but it’s the easiest possible way to shut down information, because normal people cannot host video.
Also, Europe is 745 million people, the vast majority of which do not speak English as a first language. They are the ones who need to see this. This video has ONE set of auto-generated subtitles. If I’m a Pole, I can translate your text by machine. It’s not ideal, but it WORKS. What is the majority of Europe supposed to do with this?
And before you say “everyone in Europe speaks multiple languages”, that is NOT something you can rely on. It’s a selection bias - most of the people you interact with in Europe speak English so you get the idea everyone does, cutting off the huge percentage who do not. They need information too. They still vote.
because it’s a split from his normal monthly update video where he is supposed to be interacting with his channel members.
He’s already fighting the fight, no reason to give him more work. :P
Unpopular opinion but setting up a whole recording studio and cutting a video without fucking up a bunch is a lot more fucking work than just writing a damn text document.
Because people don’t read longform text anymore.
Watching/listening to a recording is faster than reading something. I can multitask while listening to it, for instance.