Will Video Articles Ever Catch On?

You’d think that with the popularity of sites like YouTube and DailyMotion there’d be a bigger demand for video articles. I’m curious if you think that this might actually catch on.

Article marketing has enjoyed a rich past. Even before the Internet, savvy marketers were able to attract new customers by writing for trade journals and such. This idea took off online in the early 1990s when those marketers started using articles to promote themselves online. They’d publish their articles on other websites and soon that idea took off with the advent of article directories. By 2003 there were thousands of article directories online.

In 2005, YouTube sprung to popularity and video content became the new article marketing. YouTube, DailyMotion, and other sites like these became very popular destinations and once again savvy marketers used what was popular to deliver their marketing messages. YouTube today is one of the best places to present value-added content.

My idea of video article marketing is to take an article already written and simply have it read, or “acted”, by a pleasant and attractive personality in a video format. The person on screen simply reads the article so that it doesn’t appear they are reading. He or she is talking the article, giving a presentation. Why couldn’t this kind of content as an onsite supplement for website content? I’m thinking specifically about information-rich sites like Wikipedia and other sites where people go to for information. Do you ever see a time when that kind of content is supplemented with videos as a means to draw in readers who don’t want to read?