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2023-09-12 19:39:49Z (last updated 2023-09-12 19:39:49Z)
A recent Fedi post sparked this blog post:
It's funny how we make fun of old films for using brief clips of stock footage, but internet videos nowadays seem to be 95% stock footage... 🤔
Stock footage is only one part of YouTube videos. There's lots of things that go into something like a YouTube video, like:
Look, there's a lot of things that go into making YouTube videos. And I do specify "YouTube videos" because your screen recording *is* a video, but not up to the standards of YouTube videos.
The things that go into making a YouTube video has a very large cost, and for some, they just cannot afford the cost to watch (or even make!) a YouTube video.
To compare just how much cost there is to watching a YouTube video, let's say you watch the YouTube video (linked below this paragraph) at 720p (not 720p60, format 22 in yt-dlp, audio included in format 22). That's going to be compared with reading my Fairphone 4 review blog post.
The YouTube video at 720p will cost you a total 172 megabytes if you watch the video in its entirety.
The Fairphone 4 review blog post on the other hand, will only cost almost 10 kilobytes if compressed, or almost 30 kilobytes if not compressed.
Do remember that the 2 extremes are compared. Not all websites are like mine, and some websites are probably hundred times larger than mine. My website is very minimalist.
I used to have a YouTube channel, but ultimately decided to delete it because I didn't feel like making YouTube videos for a YouTube channel that not a single person care about in the 150 subscribers (yeah I don't know how I managed to even get that).
Before I deleted the channel, I requested a Google data takeout to grab all of my YouTube videos. It was about 1 terabyte of original videos, if I recall correctly.
Not all of the videos are public, not all videos was up to the standards for a "YouTube video", so that number is probably too big, but somewhere in the range of 200 gigabytes could be a reasonable number which is still big.
However, the cost of producing a video can be much much more than just storing the video. As I stated above, there's a lot of things that is made and checked, and doing such things takes time and money too.
Because of the cost in producing a video, I just... Don't. I don't make videos instead of blog posts, because I think I can do it easier with blog posts.
A blog post does not have to only have text. In the past, I've made blog posts with audio files and images. However, text is the main medium for a blog post.
For a video though, you now have access to video visuals and audio. Not all YouTube videos make great use of the video part and instead mainly focus on the audio, or they have good visuals but still rely on audio too.
The downsides of a YouTube video though, you now have a non-stop video and audio feed. Having that constant feed means you can't just stop sending video data after the visual is over. You still have it, so why waste it?
Bit similar to podcasts, podcasts is just someone rambling in audio for a long time. Or something like that.
The only thing podcasts have is audio. They do not have video. They can try (like the "Safety Third" YouTube channel), but someone listening to a podcast will ultimately lose out on any visuals that are not communicated verbally.
The "Safety Third" YouTube channel
In contrast to blog posts, blog posts have text, and anything else as someone desires. Audio? Video? Images? Those can all be included just fine. A constant running audio feed is not required for a blog post, unlike a podcast. A constant running video feed is not required for a blog post, like YouTube videos.
Now related to the above quoted post (at the top of the post), there's a pretty great example of that: Half as Interesting.
"Half as Interesting" YouTube channel
They made a video which mostly consists of barely related visuals (which is likely stock footage), but some explanatory visuals is included as well.
Some visuals are barely related to the topic of the video (just like most of the video on HAI anyways), and it doesn't contribute anything. And yet, it costs you all the data it took to encode that video.
I've already written about how YouTube videos suck in some ways (see "The videos" section in below link). I'm not writing about that again. Go click and read that section.
While I seem to be pretty negative about videos. To turn it around: not everything can be a blog post or block of text.
There are just some things which would take too long to turn into a blog post.
Some things just cannot be turned into a blog post that easily. A video of speed installing Alpine Linux doesn't have much of a blog post thing. The most text you might get out of that is how long it took you, and maybe how you got there.
Video of me speed installing Alpine Linux
You may notice that I've linked to some blog posts which uses images. The alternative is... Nothing. Just not at all. Because some things the writer just can't simply express/explain in words, so a visual is used instead, hopefully to aid in the reader's understanding.
I don't know how to end this thing about blog posts vs videos. So here is the last paragraph. Or something.