The Secret Cost of Pivoting to Video

Megalith

Megalith

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More and more publications are switching to video content, but it may be a poor strategy: according to data from comScore, sites that pivoted to video this summer have seen at least a 60-percent drop in their traffic in August compared to the same period from a year ago.

There are four reasons the pivot to video has failed: faulty metrics for measuring the audience; trusting other platforms, like Facebook, to do the hard work of distribution; low-quality video production and weak technological support for video content; and, ultimately, a failure to effectively turn video views into either higher readership or ad dollars.
 
Many people seem to browse the net from mostly mobile devices, I often skip watching video on a mobile device because I don't want to wait for it to buffer on a slow network or I'm concerned about data consumption. Give me a text article and some pictures and I'm satisfied.
 
there are a lot of how to do stuff in video that do not require a video and that it takes a lot of time to watch it and hearing. Reading a guide is faster than watching a video in many cases.
 
About the only videos I want to watch are repair/DIY videos, things like 'changing your shims on a Triumph Bonneville'. Other than that, just give me a searchable article (a few pictures are ok).
 
I prefer video content for some things and written content for others.

I think video content is great for specific types of reviews or information. I like video content for gun reviews and think it's probably more valuable than written content usually is. I like being able to see the weapon, get a feel for the size and an impression of how it is to shoot. Watching how the weapon is handled helps and I like the quick commentary usually made by the reviewer and off the cuff thoughts about the product. Also, reliability is harder to question as you can see malfunctions as they occur. I have similar feelings about car reviews and think those are best presented in video format.

For computer hardware reviews, I think video content is best left as a supplementary item and I don't believe it's all that valuable when presented only as video content. I need data and I need to be able to go over it repeatedly and on my own time.
 
tikiman2012 said:
Some of us just like to read.
Click to expand...

You may also not like a particular presenter or narrator in the video. Personally, I still think certain videos are more valuable than their written counterparts and may watch them if I find the information valuable enough regardless of what I think of the presenter or or the narrator. Although, I will usually find it from another source if I can't stand the people in the video.
 
Let's look at this from 2 high volume websites.

www.cnn.com
www.msnbc.com

While cnn still has some video the bulk of its articles are mostly written. This allows the content to be quietly looked at on your phone or at work with some privacy and you can be interrupted and easily return to where you left off.

MSNBC has gone full-on Video and the quality of the content immediately suffered due to a complete lack of editing and source verification. This gives only talking and panelist videos now and the underlying content that it says it will be about is frequently brought off-topic or lost entirely in the banter between personalities on panels. This can not be viewed in a normal work environment with sound. If you did view it at work with sound every interruption will require pausing that is slow to interact with and doesn't relaunch or work correctly frequently and replays adds whenever it can. So between the horrible viewing and editing and content focusing and poor sourcing, the quality of the site's news plummeted when switched from proper articles to random news personality talk show style.

It is easy to see for me why sites that go full video loose quality quickly and lose focus and editing quality.

The New York times just cut its editing staff to try and release breaking news more quickly with less editing and sourcing and now they are having issues with quality and are being hammered for it. I can see why this is very difficult as people don't really want hard copy newspapers for the most part, but going to the site on the phone and getting video's and advertisements in your face when you pay for the sites access just blows the experience.

This is the "breaking news flashy personality-driven world" VS "verified carefully crafted non-partisan just the facts old-school proper article text." Breaking news style has made more of a splash and more fast dollars in recent years. Old school proper article driven news organizations are losing money and subscribers.

I can see why they would get confused and think we want all video when we just want great articles on a different medium.
 
Honestly I think having to listen to it is the big turn off for me. It's a bit loud and I feel like it's distracting for people around me. It also uses data. And it takes longer to get the same information. I normally watch youtube videos at 1.25 or 1.5x speed but not all video platforms let you watch it faster. It's also often not all written down so I can't re-read something as easily. I'd have to re-watch. And the presenters often influence the way your perceive something in amusing ways. It's often more entertaining but I'm not always looking for entertainment.
 
A lot of times people put out videos because they're cheap and lazy. Videos have their place, but I like 75%+ of what I intake to be written. If HardOCP went to strictly videos I doubt I'd visit much, I wish more sites would model themselves after this site.
 
Well no shit. I can read an article real quick at work (I read very fast). But video I am limited to watching at the speed it plays at. Im forced to slow down. Oh and its also noisy so most people dont want their boss to know. And it takes more bandwidth so it costs more and is subject to being blocked.
 
I don't watch a lot of video content on my mobile device due to the excessive cost of mobile data or the context I am using my phone which might bother others around me.

I look for text articles during the day and I have a select set of YouTube subscriptions that I watch when I get home.

This discovery doesn't surprise me.
 
This makes perfect sense, we want to have data laid out for our perusal.
A video restricts us to a time line
 
Video has it's place but there are places where it shouldn't be.

When the video is annoying (the people in it, how it's produced and so on) it's something I try to avoid.
If I can get through the printed article faster than that article I will try to avoid them or the site.
If I have to sit through a 30 second ad on a 10 second article I will drop the site.

Also it annoys me to no end when an actual video channel will make those videos with no spoken words just printed like something you'd see on the Internet.
 
Another problem for sites, once a visitor clicks on a video, they will likely view only the ad(s) in that video. With a traditional text article, there is usually several places where an ad can be placed without totally irritating the reader. So video only sites yields far fewer visitors viewing 1 or 0 ads. Yep, fresh out of college with ink still wet MBA strikes again.

While it may be old fashioned, the real newspapers I have delivered don't risk infecting my PC with malware from 'we won the ad site auction' criminals, auto play videos, or nag notices asking me to turn off my script blockers or ad blockers. Plus the paper isn't tailored to my past reading experiences like so many web sites try to do. And once the paper is in my hands, the articles don't disappear if Google changes its search results.
 
I click on a web link on CNN or whoever because I want to read specifics and get details and facts.. not watch 2 commercials that are slow as fuck because 3 dozen popups and ads are loading with priority over actual content due to revenue demands, then listen to someone bloviate an opinion on what they think might be happening because the vid was cut and posted before any actual info was available...
 
More often than not, I will understand and retain information better if I read it. If I run into something in an article which I don't understand right off, it's not an issue. I can reread it without a need to rewind over and over until I understand what the writer was trying to say or I look up unfamiliar terms without needing to hit a pause button. I can likely read an article much faster than I can ever watch a video about it. Due to the fact it has to take more time and effort to put a video together, it likely means the writing for the video is probably lower quality than the writing would be for an article.

Hell, I could probably go on for days why a written article is often better than a video, especially for my tastes and preferences.

I agree with Dan that there are also times where a video is as good or better than plain text or text with pictures. As an example, I remember a while back when Kyle put out a video about a chair he got himself suckered into reviewing. He did the unboxing and installation in a video. It worked. There's no way a written article with pictures would have even remotely been able to cover the "event" as well as a video. Kyle, I don't particularly need any more unboxing videos as they're not my thing. I only watched that one due to the fact that you suckered yourself into reviewing a chair and I wanted to see your reactions this one time. Still, that one time was definitely worth the time to watch.
 
The Live Bookmark folder for BBC in Firefox suffers the same thing. There have been many times I open it, click on a news title that seems interesting, only to find it's a video instead of a written article. That tab is quickly closed before the video loads, and I curse out loud.
 
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I think video content should also have the exact same information in text/image form. I do not always want to watch a video to see a couple graphs of benchmark information for example. I think conventional news sites already do this most of the time so there is no reason for tech and other types of news to break the mold here.
 
Can we all agree that sites that use autoplay videos should face bans from the internet...for life.
 
Ah ah, the cookie bites back. Good riddance. Video is for entertainment, valuable information comes from written articles.
 
CNN is REAL bad about having a video for a story and the video itself is just pictures with captions and shitty fucking music over them. I would rather read a fucking article than read a god damned video just because you want to force a damned ad view on me. I rarely re-visit a site that its content as video. If you are doing video, do it right or don't do it at all and doing it right costs real money versus simply typing up an article.
 
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