Social Media

Tl;dr: Most Videos Are A Waste Of Time

Choose the right medium for your message

Videos have their uses. They can show you how to tie a knot or apply makeup or repair your car. They are great for cute kids and animals. Do you know what they suck at?

Pretty much everything else.

I just watched a long, boring video that was nothing but a voiceover and sections of a webpage being highlighted. I suspected the video would not have the specific information I require, but I couldn’t be sure. The only way to find out was to sit and watch the video. Spoiler alert: It did not help me a bit. It wasted several minutes of my time.

Had the website in question instead had the information in written form, I could have very quickly skimmed it. I’m a fast reader. Within seconds I’d have realized I needed to look elsewhere.

Making videos used to be difficult. Nobody had the equipment. Now, even very young children are shooting little videos. But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do something. You have to ask yourself: What is the right medium for this message?

Some things cry out for a video. I bake a lot of sourdough bread. I have watched videos to learn the stretch-and-fold maneuver, which is hard to explain in words. My husband watched a video and learned a simple way to fix our car’s air conditioning that cost us literally nothing. If he hadn’t watched it, we’d have spent $1,500 having a new unit installed.

I’m not anti-video. While I don’t like being in videos, I absolutely adore writing video scripts and directing shoots. I like finding creative ways to visually tell a story.

There are lots of ways to impart information. Know what you’re trying to do and choose the medium accordingly.

For God’s sake, do not make people listen to you spend forever introducing yourself, inviting them to like and follow you and then giving a lengthy intro:

“Hi, I’m Michelle Teheux! For more of my great content, be sure to subscribe! Today I want to talk to you about something that I really enjoy. It’s called Bitching About Literally Everything. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, let’s talk a little bit about a few other things, because I need to stretch this out to make bank on YouTube, and so far I’ve only used up about 16 seconds of your time.”

Yeah, no.

Just for fun, I timed myself reading this aloud as if I were making a video, and it took about two minutes. Reading it to myself? About 30 seconds. And it just would have been me sitting there talking.

(Plus, I’d have had to put on some makeup, something I don’t often do these days.)

When I google something, and I have the choice of text or a video, I will almost always choose the text. There is nothing more annoying than wanting a recipe and having to watch somebody spend forever showing you how to make it. Unless it’s something exotic, I probably already have a pretty good idea of how to make it. I want a list of ingredients and the oven temperature, thank you.

It’s as annoying as recipes that start off telling you somebody’s entire life story before finally getting to the actual recipe. But that’s a separate rant for another time.