Why Video Content Keeps Growing and What That Means for Writers

For years, the conversation around content has framed video and writing as competitors — as if a growing audience for video necessarily comes at the expense of an audience for text. That framing has never quite matched how people actually consume content, and it matters less every year, not more.

People don't pick one format — they switch between them

The same person who watches a long interview on their commute will, an hour later, prefer to skim a written summary of that same interview rather than rewatch it. Format preference isn't fixed; it shifts based on context — how much attention someone has available, whether they're in a position to have sound on, whether they want to search for one specific detail rather than experience the whole thing again. Video and text aren't competing for the same moment. They're serving different moments for the same person.

Video's growth expands the raw material for writing, it doesn't replace it

Every video published is also, functionally, a recorded conversation, argument, or explanation that could exist in text form. As more video gets created, the amount of source material available to turn into written content grows right alongside it. Writers who treat video as a threat are missing that the more video exists, the more raw material there is to draw from — provided that source material gets captured as text in the first place.

Search behavior hasn't shifted to video-only

Even as video consumption has grown, a huge share of how people find information still starts with a typed or spoken question, answered by text-based results. Video doesn't get discovered by search engines the way text does — it gets discovered through the text that surrounds it: titles, descriptions, and, where they exist, transcripts. This is precisely why written companions to video content matter more, not less, as video volume increases: the write-up is often what makes the video findable at all.

What this means practically

For anyone creating video content, the strategic response isn't to worry about being replaced by the format — it's to make sure every video has a written counterpart that captures its value in a form that can be searched, skimmed, and referenced independently of watching the video itself. For anyone whose main output is writing, it means treating video as an increasingly large and underused source of raw material, rather than competition for attention.

The long view

Formats rarely replace each other outright — they specialize. Radio didn't disappear when television arrived; it became the format for situations where a screen wasn't practical. The same pattern is playing out with video and text: video is winning the moments where watching and listening are the more natural way to absorb something, and text remains essential for the moments where searching, skimming, and quoting matter more than watching. Betting on either format alone, rather than treating them as complementary, is the actual risk — not video's growth itself.