Publishers Are Making More Video -- Whether You Want It or Not (bloomberg.com) 167
An anonymous reader shares a report: Mic, a website aimed at millennials, used to employ 40 writers and editors producing articles on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women." Ten were let go this month, with most in the revamped newsroom of 63 now focused on making videos for places like Facebook. Critics have called such moves "100 percent cynical" and out of sync with audience demand. Yet Americans are watching more video snippets online, either because they secretly like them or because they're getting harder to avoid. The growing audience for video, more valuable to advertisers than the space next to words, is causing websites to shift resources in what's become known across the industry as the pivot to video. Americans are expected to spend 81 minutes a day watching digital video in 2019, up from 61 minutes in 2015, according to projections by research firm eMarketer. Time spent reading a newspaper is expected to drop to 13 minutes a day from 16 minutes during that time. The question is whether those trends will sustain the growing number of outlets flooding social networks with video clips. Mic, a New York-based news site founded in 2011, was just the latest to fire writers when it announced its pivot to video this month. Dozens of writers and editors have also been laid off this summer at news outlets like Vocativ, Fox Sports, Vice and MTV News. All of the moves were tied in part to focusing more resources on making videos. Publishers are heading in this direction even though polls show consumers find video ads more irritating than TV commercials. Google and Apple are testing features that let you mute websites with auto-play videos or block them entirely. More young Americans prefer reading the news than watching it, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center. But many publishers have little choice.
No big deal (Score:5, Funny)
Just because they make videos (content or ads) doesn't mean I have to watch them. Create away!
Re:No big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because they make videos (content or ads) doesn't mean I have to watch them. Create away!
Indeed, if it's a video, I don't watch. How many news videos have I watched online this year?
0.
If one site doesn't have text, I go to another one that does. Eventually a few media producers are going to realize that there is a large demographic who don't want videos.
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The sooner publishers realize there's a reasonable contingent that won't watch videos, of any type, ever, the better. I personally don't have time for video, nor the emotionally pandering claptrap most talking heads spout these days trying to "lure" you in. The effect on me is to move on whenever I'm exposed to it, even if I care about the topic supposedly being presented. As far as the web goes, I watch 0 videos. I have no 3rd party plugins for viewing content and have disabled the internally supplied ones
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Gr8Apes wrote:
And the moment they realize they can't sell breast augmentation surgery and penis pumps to us, we'll be back to where we are.
Welcome to the ad supported internet: dumb is where the money is.
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember a lifetime ago, in a journalism class, we covered the relative strengths and weaknesses of reporting news in print vs in video.
One of the exercises was to take a news broadcast and write up the transcript for it. It pretty much drive home this little fact: the amount of information in an hour's news broadcast fills about 2/3 of a single page of a newspaper.
Some stories work better in video -- but all video has serious time constraints, and so in terms of actual information, video (even long-form video like documentary movies) can only ever give you a summary.
The same hold true for fiction. Movies, for example, are the equivalent of a written short story.
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Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. I'm still pretty partial to radio, myself. One of the most moving/informative moments I've ever heard was from CBC's "As it Happens." The show basically consists of the hosts phoning up relevant people all over the world, and interviewing them at length for the show. It tends to be a mix of light hearted fare (An interview with the guy who won the cheese rolling race in the UK) and more serious items, speaking with an elderly lady who's home was flooded in Hous
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I've only heard it in replay, but back in 1994, they interviewed a Hutu woman in Rwanda during the height of the genocide. They were on the phone with her as she hid in her home as the Tutsi militias knocked on her door.
Pretty sure you mean it was a Tutsi women hiding from Hutu militias. Although in rural areas of Rwanda there was Hutu on Hutu killings too. The Hutu/Tutsi division is pretty artificial, its an easy mistake to make.
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But what if we readers are in the minority? I don't really know any stats, but i am afraid that the video-consumers outnumber the text-consumers by a fair bit :-(
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But what if we readers are in the minority? I don't really know any stats, but i am afraid that the video-consumers outnumber the text-consumers by a fair bit :-(
Based on the responses of people on Slashdot, I would suspect that even if we're in the minority we're a large enough group that at least one website would want to cater to us.
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Just because they make videos (content or ads) doesn't mean I have to watch them. Create away!
Not so fast. From TFS:
Americans are expected to spend 81 minutes a day watching digital video in 2019, up from 61 minutes in 2015, ...
So you'd better get busy if you want to get a meets (or exceeds) expectations on your annual review.
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And if you think the demand is there for the written word, maybe you should start a company that has that focus. If everyone hates video then you have a huge product on your hands.
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Flamebait? My god. If even slashdot can't handle snark, the internet really is over.
Have fun in your Safe Spaces, kids.
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Snark and sarcasm are only two of the services I offer.
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But if there is a market for Kool Aid, shouldn't Kool Aid be sold?
You're a typical elite intellectual, denying the masses their Kool Aid even though the Raspberry flavor goes so well with Arsenic.
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But if there is a market for Kool Aid, shouldn't Kool Aid be sold?
You're a typical elite intellectual, denying the masses their Kool Aid even though the Raspberry flavor goes so well with Arsenic.
Except at (still the never-ending) Trump rallies. There, people seem to prefer the Orange Kool-Aid.
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Point is it's all going video and writers are being fired.
If that's the point, it's simply straight-up wrong. There will always be written alternatives, because the the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various formats. What the article is saying is that the Big Boys are moving to video. That may very well be true, but they're very far from the only fish in the sea.
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we'll see.
I'm reminded that when radio was introduced, everyone got all concerned that it would be the death of print media. It wasn't, because radio sucks at the things print excels at.
Then, when TV became popular, everyone got all concerned that it would be the death of print media. It wasn't, for the same reason as radio.
This is no different. It is literally impossible to replace written word with video -- especially for things like news -- because video sucks at the sort of thing writing is great at.
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I would argue that things are very different these days.
Ah, the nut of the difference in our worldviews. I don't see anything indicating that things are substantially different these days compared to the past.
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Point is it's all going video and writers are being fired
It is, at 'Mic, a website aimed at millennials' that runs articles 'on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women."'. Irrespective of the format, the content is no great loss.
Fahrenheit 452 (Score:2)
cf 2016 election onwards
Horribly inefficient (Score:5, Insightful)
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Video works if what is spoken is also available as text. Either on the sidebar with timecode (which I'd prefer) or at least as subtitles. That way you can fast forward through the video to get to the part that interests you.
Anyone not providing either needn't apply.
Re:Horribly inefficient (Score:5, Insightful)
Video works if what is spoken is also available as text.
Even if it is, it's still incredibly inefficient. Video has an incredibly low information density -- those transcripts show it: look at how short they are, and how light on information.
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There are things that are easier shown than explained. I sure wouldn't want to learn dancing from an instruction text.
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And I wouldn't want to learn four-dimensional equations from a video with no text.
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I wouldn't want to learn it from a video at all. The point is that not every problem is a nail, no matter how much you love your hammer. The right tool for the right problem is the key.
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Not everything should be on video, but video is not every time inferior to written information.
I trust you can see the difference here.
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"Even if it is, it's still incredibly inefficient. Video has an incredibly low information density -- those transcripts show it: look at how short they are, and how light on information."
Usually they just show some moron 'reading' the relevant information, only with a couple of hundred additional superfluous words, so that the reader is shown longer onscreen, because the idiot is enamored with himself, exactly the reason I don't watch TV news. ...
BTW that reminds me of someone
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I watch youtube videos at 2x with subtitles on, 1.5x if no subtitles and the guy has a thick accent. It takes maybe a full day to adjust, but once you do, you can never go back to 1x video. People spend about half their time thinking about what they're going to say next it's awful once you realize it. Also works wonders for online training courses.
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I was actually thinking the other day the new dictation technology they keep would be best used on how to videos that should have been text directions anyway. I often find myself googling how to do something, avoiding the youtube links and searching for text directions and if there's nothing else jumping around the video. Just scrape all the text out of it automatically and serve that up instead. Basically an auto transcript.
You could even use some sort of weighting or voting system with the original video
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Video works if what is spoken is also available as text. Either on the sidebar with timecode (which I'd prefer) or at least as subtitles. That way you can fast forward through the video to get to the part that interests you.
Anyone not providing either needn't apply.
There are a whole army of ADA Compliance lawyers out there eagerly awaiting for the organization that tries to put out video without exact description and dialogue in text as well.
I am not at all worried about "videoonlyclpyse" happening.
Here's your subbed video. Happy? (Score:2)
Hard subs or DVD-style image-of-text subs would work for the seeing deaf, and I imagine it'd be hard to find enough deafblind users to build standing.
Re:Horribly inefficient (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's because I'm a fast reader, or I can skim for certain words.
This is a common habit for on-screen consumption of information. Few "read" a website, most scan/skim for headings, and read the first 5-6 words of the paragraph to determine if the information they are looking for might be in that area.
Videos break how users regularly interact with finding information online/onscreen, and it slows down their ability to complete their task (find the information they want), which is why this practice is found annoying.
Reference: How Users Read on the Web [nngroup.com] (Spoiler: They don't)
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Why is everyone always so prejudiced against skim milk? There's really nothing wrong with 1% milk! The less fat content the better, right?
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There's really nothing wrong with 1% milk!
This is correct if you're disregarding taste and substance. Just like video vs writing!
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Videos are useful where you want to pack a lot of complex technical information into a communication.
Videos aren't useful for gossip.
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Like, err, human anatomy?
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You have that exactly backwards.
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Okay, so, I usually do a 15-20 page write-up to explain the financial models behind the Universal Social Security framework [google.com]. This involves a whole lot of numbers, tangential references to the effectiveness of our public aid systems, and so forth. For example: 3/4 of families qualified by the Government for HUD Housing Assistance go on a waiting list and never receive benefits (they never graduate from the waiting list).
While it takes about 2-3 minutes to map out which services I'm restructuring, the c
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Yet another reminder that you are the product, not the customer.
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Sometimes efficiency isn't the point; not everything has to be super efficient.
Take the example I mentioned above; Edward R. Murrow's account of his visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Sure, the information could have been conveyed in a page or two of text, but it would not have anywhere near the impact of hearing directly from an eye witness. There is information conveyed in that report that goes beyond the mere words; the rawness, the emotion, the anger. Some of that just can't be conveyed on the
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I find videos horribly inefficient at relaying information.
That depends entirely on the information. A picture says a 1000 words. Sometimes you need the words so it's absolutely clear. Sometimes you need the picture for the information density that no words can match.
A picture's worth a thousand words (Score:2)
40-10=63? (Score:1)
Stopped reading after that.
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I do hate videos, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mic, a website aimed at millennials, used to employ 40 writers and editors producing articles on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women." Ten were let go this month, with most in the revamped newsroom of 63 now focused on making videos for places like Facebook.
And nothing of value was lost.
I really do hate videos though; won't watch them. They're a waste of time for me, as I am able to read and comprehend faster than any video can present the information.
This is made worse by the fact that folks who make the video seem intent on wasting even more time with intros and other cruft before getting to the subject.
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This is made worse by the fact that folks who make the video seem intent on wasting even more time with intros and other cruft before getting to the subject.
You can thank Youtube for that, since they pay more for videos over 10 minutes. Videos that would previously have been 4 minutes long are now 10 to get them extra pennies. Also, it's easier to shoot an hour of video and edit it down to 10 minutes than it is to edit it down to 4 minutes because scenes that drag get left in rather than re-shot.
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You can thank Youtube for that, since they pay more for videos over 10 minutes.
IIRC, The average watch time on YouTube is 2.5 minutes. YouTube wants people to stay on their website for longer periods of time. If a video can entice people to watch longer than the average time, the algorithm will reward creators for doing that.
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It's not surprising the video creators have responded this way, I would have too. "You mean I get paid more for doing less editing? Sign me up!"
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"You mean I get paid more for doing less editing? Sign me up!"
Depends on how you edit your video. Casey Neistat typically spends eight hours editing his videos and most of his videos are in the 10 to 15 minute range. Of course, he is a professional filmmaker.
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I still remember when YouTube had a 10 minute maximum for videos. Should we blame Youtube, or blame the users (both producers and viewers) who pushed for the ability to upload longer videos?
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There's no blame, there are justifiable reasons for long videos. I'm glad Youtube accepts them, as it saves having to watch multiple short videos on the same topic. What I don't like is the part about short videos becoming long ones because they pay more and because they require less editing. Fortunately, a lot of "padded" videos can be viewed at 1.5x speed with no loss in comprehensibility.
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Fortunately, a lot of "padded" videos can be viewed at 1.5x speed with no loss in comprehensibility.
Another word for "padded" videos is "bad" videos. I have a better solution for dealing with them: I don't watch them, and stop following channels that have too many of them.
There's a lot of content out there, and so there's no reason for me to put up with any that I find even mildly irritating.
Re:I do hate videos, but... (Score:5, Informative)
They're a waste of time for me, as I am able to read and comprehend faster than any video can present the information.
While that is true, my objection to videos is that it is easier to mislead with a video. I will give two examples. First, in "Bowling from Columbine" there is a video of a Charlton Heston speech with a cut away to a sign from the audience in the middle...except that it was not A speech, it was two separate speeches. The cut away to the sign was so that the audience would not notice that he was wearing a different shirt in each part of the "speech". They seamlessly combined the audio of Charlton Heston speaking from both speeches with no break in the audio to hint that it was not all one speech. In written text, you would need to put some ellipses in, or some other indication of a break and people would expect you to tell them where the speech occurred. Then if you did not state that it was two separate speeches, they would, rightly, call you out for lying. In the video version, Michael Moore claimed it was an innocent oversight.
A second example was my first exposure to Alex Jones, now of InfoWars. A friend, knowing I am conservative, sent me a couple of videos from Alex Jones. I watched the first one and at one point there is ongoing audio over various video clips. The video clips LOOKED like they were related to what was being said in the audio...and if they were they lent great credence to what was otherwise a suspect idea. Well, I happened to know what the video clips actually were and knew they had nothing to do with the audio. Just as in Bowling for Columbine the video was designed to make you interpret the audio in a way contrary to what logic would dictate.
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In Fahrenheit 911, Moore talked about sending bin Ladens back home while the camera panned over all the canceled flights, giving the impression that the bin Ladens were spirited out of the country when nobody else could fly. I dislike that sort of thing. I mostly agreed with Moore, but using cheap tricks gives the impression that you don't have anything substantive.
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Video does a better job of satisfying attention-seeking tendencies, looking at it from the other side. Face and voice time are addictive, writing doesn't stroke the ego as much. It's the 15 minutes of fame syndrome.
Likewise, I hate when I start to watch a Youtube video and the person blathers on without getting to the point or saying anything meaningful for 5 minutes; apparently they like the sound of their own voice. That and/or they're trying to inflate the length of the video for ad purposes.
This is ano
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I'm shocked to be defending videos, but there is one small defense for them: Most people suck at explaining things, and a vanishingly small percent of the population can write technical instructions. However, this appalling lack of communication ability doesn't mean that a much larger percent of the population doesn't know how to do things that others might need to learn.
I've run into a couple of situations where I needed to learn how to do something, take something apart, fix something, where the
Next bubble? (Score:2)
So next to burst is the big video bubble I guess
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Make away (Score:5, Insightful)
More and more people are ignoring your bullshit videos. Whether you want it or not.
Welcome to the free market, bitches. If you don't provide it, someone else will.
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Actually, videos are showing the most successful steps forward in marketing we've seen in recent history. Explainer videos, in particular, have become prime marketing tools, effectively communicating both complex information and a sense of emotion to excite an audience over a subject such as a product or political call to action.
Thing is you can't pour steak sauce on donuts. Steak sauce is a wonderful thing, just not here.
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effectively communicating both complex information
I've never seen a video, ever, that accomplished this. Not to say they don't exist, but I maintain they're pretty rare.
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Try this link
https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com] if you don't think "three blue one brown" communicates complex information effectively in a video format I don't know what to tell you. Of course the written information is also necessary, but I don't think it would be accurate to say that you'd be better off with only the written and not the video.
You may still be right that they're rare, but not so rare that they can't make up at least 80% of what I watch on youtube. Maybe you're just not looking for them.
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I don't think it would be accurate to say that you'd be better off with only the written and not the video.
I didn't mean to imply that video was without value. It absolutely can work with written to enhance understanding, and there are certainly topics that are best explained with video, and there are people who understand things better when presented in a video format (I'll confess that generally speaking, I am not one of those people).
My fundamental point was that video will not -- indeed cannot -- replace the written word wholesale, so I have no fear of these sites moving to video. Even if they go to video on
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More and more people are ignoring your bullshit videos
There must be some kind of fine art for saying the exact opposite of the summary and then getting modded up for it. Kudos to you.
Advertisers have too much control (Score:3)
But many publishers have little choice.
Advertisers want stats. They want to know every little thing they can about an audience even if it doesn't help them. They can sell the data on to someone else who thinks they can extract the value.
Why is this relevant to the article? Because videos help gather that info for them. You'll notice, that alongside this rise in video content, is a there's a rise in the amount of hosted content. It can get the demo info by being linked to a Facebook profile or to a YouTube profile or whatever platform is hosting the video. Few sites will self-host the content not because they can't afford it, but because it won't have the same demographic information. What FB has been able to do is to put together a standard format of data to be used by advertisers. That's hugely useful for their datamining efforts.
Just how useful all this demographic info is an entirely different discussion to have. I don't think it's very useful, at least not nearly as useful as the advertisers think or want it will be.
I must just be old... (Score:5, Insightful)
...am I the only one that DESPISES video-delivered content?
Sure, there are contexts where it's very helpful, like some DIY videos or somesuch.
But in terms of news or general information on a subject, video content is WORSE than a bloody voicemail: it's linear, it's high-bandwidth, it's usually packed full of ads and crap or front/back stingers that are half the length of the video, and ultimately info-lite.
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And worse, two days later you have essentially no way of finding that video again to check a detail. How are you going to find that one video where the speaker mentioned some obscure sentence that ought to be really easy to Google for?
News websites (Score:2)
I noticed lots of news websites stopped showing photos with their news articles and now only show a video of those photos, I just skip the story all together. Another one is the slide out video ad that pushes down the article text as you read. Who the fuck came up with that idea?
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Another one is the slide out video ad that pushes down the article text as you read.
You need to use NoScript. You'll never see that sort of thing again.
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Yeah, even uBlock doesn't handle those well. Newsweek drops that shit in the sidebar when you scroll down, and every time uBlock blocks it, the script detects it's not there and relaunches it. 30k blocking attempts while I read the article....
Fake traffic reports? (Score:2)
My guess would be that the publishers show their advertisers the number of times the video played, even if the no one actually watched it.
So, it's a giant scam.
somehow this story lacks punch... (Score:2)
You know, somehow this story seems to lack punch. Bloomberg needs to do something to jazz it up a little.
(If only they gave us some obvious hypocrisy to complain about, then it might really go viral.)
Definitely don't want, can't consume (Score:2)
There is no time/place for watching a video, especially ones with more style than substance, hot takes full of hot garbage.
A concise article is always preferable, easier to read, don't need to find earbuds etc, can't copy and paste from a video to quote to friends etc
Bye, CNN (Score:2)
I had to install a video autoplay blocker because CNN autoplays videos, usually with ads, and no way to pause them as they remove the pause button.
Well, you can click on the video ad and be directed to the ad site in another tab, pausing it of course.
No thanks, CNN.
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Unfortunately most of my favorite past websites now auto play video when clicking on an article. A couple do have the ability to turn the auto play feature off. The ones that do not, I have either stopped going or it's very rare.
The really sad part, quite often the video that auto plays has very little relevance to the actual article.
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And that's what I really, really don't get. Why did someone come to an article on your page? Because they want to read that article. What's your response? Throw up an overlay to mask it, and make them click through a "subscribe today" box. Drop an ad overtop they have to get through. Post distracting ads on the page and in the middle of the article. Drop in auto-playing video that doesn't have to do with the article.
What the fuck? None of those things were why someone went to the article in the fir
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Reminds me of the old days when you could misclick (or, I guess, click) and get to a porn site, which would have endless popups to prevent you from leaving. It seemed to me that, if I wanted to subscribe, I would with fewer popups, and all they were doing was convincing me that porn is annoying.
Gluttony is not a good thing. (Score:3)
Videos are harder to avoid (Score:2)
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Chrome for Android doesn't autoplay videos unless they're marked as muted in the HTML.
I don't get it (Score:2)
Do they seriously expect me to constantly disturb everyone around me by playing video with sound on my smartphone? In a world where people have less and less available time, they expect me to sit through 10-20 minute videos instead of reading through the same content in a couple of minutes? Yeah, not gonna happen.
Didn't mic just shit down a video service? (Score:2)
I can't recall the clever name, but it was on my atv. I watched it once in a while, and often remembered thinking it was interesting information and ideas being oresented and it'd sure be swell to read about them.
images (Score:5, Insightful)
Videos rank right up there with my other pet peeve - people sending me pictures of text they want me to analyse for troubleshooting.
They fetched such and such a (huge) URL or they submitted this (huge) query and got such and such an error so they send me a screenshot. Now I have to type the whole thing in to reproduce their issue.
To top it, they usually resize the image to make it smaller for email so now the text is minuscule and blurry too.
Fuck the talking heads (Score:2)
That is all.
I see the logic (Score:2)
Stupid people find reading difficult and watching video easy. Who's going to buy your product? Readers tend to think watchers not so much. For advertisers the case for video is strong.
Not just young Americans... (Score:2)
I'm nearly 59 and I hate video news as well. The only exception is if there's actually something visual and moving to show, and even then I'd rather have text with the story and a link to the clip.
out of sync with audience demand (Score:2)
Digg.com is a poster child of that phrase
Since Digg came out with their much vaunted version 4 at the end of August, the social media blogs have documented in detail the trail of disaster which will surely become a case study in how to screw up a social site in business courses across the land. http://www.techradar.com/news/... [techradar.com]
FUCK Mic - Qatar propaganda! (Score:2)
Look who funds it.
Missing the real point (Score:2)
I'm way to late and nobody's going to see this, but the real point of video vs text is that it's harder to copy video without acknowledging the original source. This is why the news networks love it. CNN can write a story, I can scrape it with a bot and put it on my website, with my ads and no credit to them-no problem. I can also take CNN's video and host it, but when I do it obviously came from CNN. Even if I use it to push my ads, the viewer knows it's not my content, and will be more likely to look st
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Not for me. (Score:2)
This is why I wrote a browser extension for my main desktop browser that literally blocks it from being able to play any media (video or audio) at all. I'd rather do without YouTube and Netflix on the desktop than have to deal will this deluge of crap.
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In my experience, there's already a significant number of people who don't really know how to read. They can read, but they somehow fail to retain any of the information they read and are not able to follow simple step-by-step instructions laid out in front of them. I'm not sure if this is getting any better or worse than in the past, but I find myself constantly getting frustrated in the workplace by people who just don't seem to be able to follow instructions or get information from a piece of text.
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Writing video copy and writing articles are two different skillsets.
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> To make matters worse, the videos are now HTML5 and many browsers haven't
> baked in controls to disable autoplay html5 videos (Looking at you Metro-IE!).
In Pale Moon, go to "about:config" and set both "media.autoplay.allowscripted" and "media.autoplay.enabled" to "false" to kill HTML5 autoplay. The only downside/side-effect is that sometimes you have to click 2 or 3 times to get a Youtube video to play.