8 Reasons Why I Hate Internet Marketing Videos

A lot of new internet marketing products get released in video format lately, a trend I find very annoying.

I do think that a lot of people learn a lot better by watching, rather than reading. As you may have guessed by now, I am not one of them, but I even have my doubts as to whether all the video products out there actually help anyone.

The reasons I think that video is not a very good tool for teaching internet marketing are as follows (please note, some of these points may not apply to a particular video set, but I have generally found them to hold true):

1. Low-Quality Video Direction:
   1. All the video products I have ever looked at make use of software that records screen activity, with the author providing a voice-over to explain what he is doing on the screen.
   2. Some products actually consist of nothing but those videos, while others add some ‘talking head’ moments, with someone explaining the technique, frequently with bad lighting and set design.
   3. The editing tends to be very bad, with over-long pauses and sudden cuts
2. They are Slow: Maybe its just me, but I read a lot faster than I listen or watch, so it always seems to me like the videos take ages to get to a point. Very often I have seen cases where the author will say something like ‘and now we will go and check X’, followed by thirty seconds of silence, as we watch the cursor move around the screen, navigating on its way to the relevant information. A process which was often demonstrated to the user earlier on in the series.
3. They explain the obvious: To be fair, this is also a problem with a lot of eBooks out there. A lot of video creators seem to assume that a user is completely ignorant of how to use the basics online, and explain such things as how to fill out a form (’… and then type in your address in the address field”). Really, if somebody cannot figure out how to fill in a form on a sign-up page, perhaps, just perhaps, internet marketing is not the field they should be going into.
4. They are not browsable: If you are using an eBook, you can use various methods to find information within it, such as searching, using indexes, links, etc… With a video its a lot harder to find that one piece of information you need, without watching the whole thing.
5. They do not provide other resources: Any good eBook would contain links to other useful resources. While it is possible to embed links in a video, I have not seen any internet marketing videos that make use of this. Leaving the user to remember the URL of any resources mentioned and type it in later. Just to make this a bit more difficult, the urls are often not displayed on the screen for long enough… Unless the creator has erred on the side of caution, and the user is left staring at the link for a couple of minutes.
6. They are not portable: Audio products suffer from some of the same problems as video, but they have one big advantage: I can listen to them while driving. Watching videos while driving would be a really bad idea.
7. Internet Marketing is not a good subject matter for videos: Lets face it, from the visual point of view, internet marketing looks pretty boring. It boils down to one guy/girl sitting in front of a computer, moving the mouse around, and typing stuff. Even the software on screen does not look that exciting.
8. Bandwidth: Videos are big, and most sites that sell them use streaming video, which has the double annoyance of making it difficult to download to your computer (so, if the site goes down, you cannot access the information you paid for), and making it very choppy on a slow connection.

Well, there you have it. Despite what I said in this post, I am sure that more and more internet marketing videos will start to appear, due to the low cost and ease of producing them.

[tags]video, internet marketing, streaming video, internet marketing videos[/tags]