Why does he feel that it’s necessary to present the information by talking into a webcam? What’s wrong with publishing text?
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?
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.
