When text wins over video

I know the future, and present, of online consumption is video. Audio falls in and out of favor. Text seems like a dinosaur.

When does text still win over video?

John Gruber thinks he knows and I find it encouraging – especially for email newsletter publishers. He recently released a podcast episode (yes, audio is meta here), about content strategy. In one segment of the episode, he talks about something new he’s noticing that he calls, “video fatigue.”

“Sometimes you never know, when you have an audience of our size, when you’ll just make an offhand comment that you didn’t even think twice about, but then all of a sudden your inbox fills up with email from readers, ‘Yes, yes, I have been waiting for someone to mention video fatigue. I’m so tired of hitting play and watching video. I read so much faster than I can watch a video, even with the playback controls, and get so much more out of it. I love that your site doesn’t have videos. Love.’”

While I disagree with Gruber on just about everything he posts outside of tech, and sometimes within tech (he gets the founding of podcasting wrong in this episode), I’m drawn-in every time he opens up about content strategy. He’s always been a decade ahead of where the rest of the media should be.

I don’t think text is always the answer. It’s about clarity. If you can get the point across in a sentence or two, you’ll win over the algorithmically-incentivized, bloated, 10-minute YouTube video, or the outrage-fueled 30-second video that only exists to get you to click on the next outrage-fueled 30-second video.

Get to the point. Be useful. Text can win.