Siggy has a very good essay up about a subject I care about: Blogs vs. YouTube.
Blogging has been declining. I don’t have much evidence, aside from Google trends, but it’s fairly obvious from personal experience. For example, atheist blogs used to be a huge cultural force, with big celebrities and countless indie blogs, and now it’s sort of a backwater with a few networks of marginal relevance, and a mostly dead indie space. And no other blogosphere has replaced what atheist blogging once was.
Maybe his just has to do with my personal circles? As a reality check I tried looking up the question. I learned, according to Google, that blogging is bigger than ever, and is still a great way to make money by advertising your product! Okay, so I should specify that I’m not interested in all blogs, because marketing blogs can go die in a fire. I’m talking about personal blogs, and more specifically essay blogs. Essay blogs are declining, that’s what I meant.
Essays aren’t dead though, because it is now popular to present essays in video format. The video essay is a booming genre, and I for one think it’s great, for the same reason essay blogs are great. But there are also some significant differences.
They make a lot of good points, but I’d add that the barriers to entry for video essays are much higher. Sure, you can do some of it on the cheap, witness all the cell phone camera videos, but the big timers have production skills and are deploying good lighting and even sets. There are also new presentation skills you have to know — being able to speak quickly and smoothly is not a universal ability. I know I’m more comfortable taking an hour or two to write than just getting in front of a camera and talking for 10 minutes. I also don’t have to put on makeup to write something over coffee (not that I put on makeup for any of my videos).
I’ll also disagree with Siggy on one thing: drama is not more difficult on YouTube. In some ways it’s worse. Take some right-winger who is good at just spewing noise and doesn’t bother to actually research what they say (say, Sargon, or Steven Crowder, who make gobs of money on noise), and they can generate lots of drama, much of it consisting of guys yelling at each other. Tim Pool and Alex Jones are nothing but masturbatory auto-generated drama! I manage to avoid much of it by the simple expedient of favoring videos that are under a half hour long. While there are some people who are really good at long format, in-depth conversations, the most successful people on YouTube seem to be cheesy motormouths who can yammer for hours, usually about gossipy trash-talk, or squeaking as they play video games. If you aren’t putting in more time to research what you’re going to say than in saying it, you probably aren’t worth listening to.
Also, one thing the two approaches have in common is they’ve both been saddled with the most hideous names. Blog? Vlog? Bletch.
One of the reasons for the decline of blogs, I’d argue, is the efforts of the big services to concentrate control in their hands. When blogs were big, we were using RSS readers and news feeds, which were distributed mechanisms for customizing and personalizing access. Now everybody is at the mercy of The Algorithm, whatever that is, and goes to a centralized site like YouTube that uses their software to guess what you’d like to see, and often guesses wrong.