On Talking Slideshows
Of late Youtube seems to be filled with what I'd call talking slideshows where the video is just a series of pictures with the narrator talking about the pictures along with other stuff.
Videos like this are better off being blog posts which can be consumed in far less time than it takes to watch a video. But in the times we live in, it is far harder to monetize blogs than it is for video content. It makes sense for creators who do a fair bit of research on a topic to make it into a video and hope that they get compensated for their time.
But the end result is a sub-optimal use of consumers' time. Advertising has to be one of the most destructive human inventions. Everything it touches gets poisoned.
Corporations gave away tech freely in order to acquire users and made it nearly impossible to build services that users have to pay for. Then in order to make a profit, the corporations let advertisers loose on their user base. This worked for a while for blogs, but then blogspam started getting churned out by the petabyte and blogs became useless for advertisers.
Now videos are what advertisers prefer and you have to wonder with recent developments in AI, how long it is before videospam takes over video. What will the advertisers do then? What will be the endgame of this arms race?