Somebody emailed me in October to ask when I was starting a podcast. It was a kind email. The gist was that everyone else has one, that audio is where the audience went, and that I was leaving something on the table by continuing to type sentences into a website.
They are probably right about the table. I am going to keep typing sentences into a website.
Two years ago the industry pivoted to video, all at once, on the strength of numbers that turned out to be inflated. Publishers laid off writers. Agencies rewrote content strategies overnight to be video-first. I watched most of those strategies quietly stop being mentioned about eleven months later, and nobody ever circled back to explain what happened.
Format follows from having something to say, and a great many people moved to video because they had nothing to say and hoped a camera would cover for them.
Writing is the cheapest possible test of whether an idea holds. A half-formed thought survives a video. It gets read aloud with good lighting and confident hands and it sounds fine. Put the same thought in a paragraph and the paragraph will not close. You sit there at the end of it knowing something is missing, because there is nothing to hide behind.
That is the actual reason I still do this, and it has almost nothing to do with audience size. I have thought more clearly about brand strategy in eight years of posts than in any workshop I have ever run. The blog is where I find out whether I believe the thing I said so confidently in a meeting on Tuesday.
A half-formed thought survives a video.
The second reason is arithmetic. A post I wrote in 2017 about tagline decay still turns into a client conversation every couple of months. It sits there. It is searchable, quotable, and portable. Someone pastes one line of it into a Slack thread and the argument travels without me in the room. Video does not travel that way. Neither does a webinar, and we have all attended far too many webinars this year.
This is not a case against video. Some ideas are visual and belong on camera, and the brands doing it well are doing something writing cannot. It is a case against changing your format because a platform changed its incentives. Chase distribution and you spend a decade rebuilding for whatever the algorithm rewards next. Pick the format that makes your thinking sharper and you keep the thinking.
The karaoke place in Southeast has been dark since March, and the host who calls everyone baby is somewhere in this city being charming at nobody. I have not sung in front of strangers in eight months. Writing is what I have instead: standing up in a room, badly, with commitment, finding out whether it lands.