There's been a new (okay, not that new) frustrating trend on the internet in recent years that I promise neither I nor my fellow critics will make you readers suffer through on this site. Slowly, many of my favorite and least favorite sites have been shifting from written content and articles, to more videos, podcasts, and the like. There was a time when watching videos on the internet was a pain in the ass and required waiting five minutes for your Windows Media Player or Quicktime to load and buffer, but now that flash has become such and easy and quick way to share video content sites just assume that I'm going to want more of it. I don't. Now I understand that the internet is filled with illiterates and dogs who probably don't want to deal with our written language, but for those of us who made it past kindergarten, we don't want to sit and our computers and hear or watch someone drone on about some shit we can read in 1/2-1/3 the amount of time. It's a pain in the ass. Audiobooks are supposed to be read at 150-160 WPM, and most internet videos or podcasts are certainly spoken a lot slower than that: I would estimate in the low 100's. The average human, however, can read 250-300 WPM, and if you're smart enough to be reading my blog, I'm sure you're much better than an average reader. Furthermore, it's easier to stop and start reading, read with the game on in the background, and read in public places (or at work) if you're stuck without headphones. When you're reading an article, it doesn't take as long to load, and you don't have to suffer through the increasingly prevalent commercials that sites force you to watch before the feature video. With all the shit coming before it, a short video can almost cost you double the amount of time as the actual video, and 4-5 times what an article would have taken to read. And most of the time the video is going to be crap, but you're not going to know until you've finished the whole thing, because you have to wait for the advertisement and then it's much more difficult to skip around and skim through the video. The internet allows anyone to write whatever they want; that's what makes it great, but that also means over 99% of it is a waste of your time (even more so than the sudoku or texttwist website you frequent). Written content may not be any better than audio or visual, but at least when content is written you can figure out if it's any good or not in a matter of seconds.
I'm not saying that there's not a place for video on the internet, or that it should be done away with. It can be helpful in things like video product reviews or sports highlights that really benefit from seeing what's being described. But I don't need to see or hear a reporter interviewing an expert when I can just read it, and I don't need to see a 2.5 minute video of Katherine Heigl telling me her 5 favorite movies (spoiler alert: they all suck) on Rotten Tomatoes when I can just as easily make fun of her after taking a 3 second peak at it in list form (note: RT has actually started writing the list at the bottom of the articles, something they didn't do originally. Kudos.) Why so many websites have started doing this, I'm not sure, but there seems to be a few obvious answers. For one thing, the already mentioned 30 second commercials before each video simply wouldn't fly for written content, so it's obviously a better way to bring in ad revenue. In some cases, like ESPN.com, the website is just taking content directly from its television programming which certainly saves them time and money. I would also assume that in some cases, especially for podcasts, it's easier to speak the content than write it, since many of them don't seem entirely scripted; for those that are fully scripted, however, it would be more effort since you would have to do all the writing and then do the recording in addition. Finally, maybe they just think people like it better, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were right, considering how dumb most people are. You, my reader, are not dumb. You have come here to get a higher standard of internet content, and that is what you will receive.
BV
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