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tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

This kind of drives me bonkers too – a lot of video content that would do fine in non-video form is in video. Ditto for podcasts.

I think that a lot of people – no idea if this is the case here – post content to YouTube because it’s got a low barrier to monetize a channel. I think that there’s a very valid argument that there should be a written-media equivalent to YouTube. Like, there are blogging services, but AFAIK there isn’t one that does that sort of monetization.

I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s that hosting video is bandwidth-expensive, so it’s harder for another service to just rip the content or something.

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quicksand@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Video ads are a lot more expensive/lucrative than still ads, I’m assuming

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guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Watching videos is like an order of magnitude easier than reading for large swathes of the population. Fully 18% of the US adult population is functionally illiterate – they can pass a reading test, but their reading level is so low it hardly matters. These folks can still watch YouTube/Dystopian Vine (sorry, TikTok).

Also, this much is just my own speculation, but A/V media is a lot easier to push people’s emotional buttons with because it’s much, much faster and easier to consume content via video and we’re likely hardwired to pay more attention to audio/visual stimuli than abstract imagery in our heads. A video+audio track of an explosion is always going to hit people harder than a careful description of the same explosion, and if people expect it to be easier and to provide a larger emotional impact, they’re more likely to go for the thing that makes them feel something more easily.

We are all governed by dopamine more than we like to admit.

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CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You are absolutely correct— major blog hosting, image hosting, and video hosting sites are all “free” for the content creator, but YouTube by far has the largest audience and highest monetization rates of any of them.

This is just creators buying in with their wallets; it makes sense to go where the money is, even if the format sucks for the idealized content consumer.

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- tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It sounds like this particular YouTube channel may take money to promote products – it has a bit on “contacting the creator about business opportunities”. I suppose that that would be independent of ad revenue, though not of audience size.
  
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  - CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I wouldn’t immediately jump to that conclusion. There are plenty of legitimate business opportunities that do not imply “taking money to promote products”. Even properly disclosed free samples are standard operating procedure for the tech industry, but they are completely above board, and by themselves do not imply bias.
    
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