Blogging Vs Vlogging (Youtube)! Which one is better in 2020?

I have not posted many blogs in a while but still this is a medium that always has been very close to my heart. I am not sure how but lately my interest  in watching video blogs/video logs or vlogs in short on youtube has considerably increased.

It is no news that the medium of the moving pictures has just taken over the entire world by storm , much faster than how blogging had become a trend. 

So, what is the reason behind this shift ? 

I am no expert researching this for my PhD, but what I think is that the "vlogging" is an easier medium to express. 

Blogging requires telling a story and a well written blog helps the reader in visualising the story being told. 

Vlogging on the other hand , is already a step ahead, where you are  experiencing a visual story upfront. 

You tube or other mushrooming micro vlogging sites , are  impactful, easy to comprehend and more convincing without requiring the viewer to have a sound vocabulary or dictionary by side  to appreciate the finer nuances of the language that the blogger has painstakingly used in his blogs. 

Be it a tech vlog or any other related to cooking, learning , dancing , or any other thing under the sun , visualising helps in comprehending the message better and as they say, "seeing is believing". 

In fact it is so much fun watching the cake rise than reading a recipe on a blog looking at a still picture , that just  might be from a photo stock. Watching the cake and witnessing it rise makes you part of the creation. You can relate better with the process , the person and the story being told. So is it the trust factor ?  May be.  "How can i believe you? I want to see it with my own eyes". Probably the videos are literally better in putting things in perspective.

No wonder the number of influencers is growing by the hour on these sites and brands are not shying away from using social media for marketing. The money is pouring in and it is enabling literally anyone and everyone who wasn't earlier able to express to come out to forefront. And in fact they are coming out and in astonishing numbers. It is mind blowing to see how many are using the medium like youtube, Tik tok , FB and Insta and earning real good money. 

If Blogging was considered to be for the elite, vlogging has just smashed that notion out of the park and is probably the greatest leveler of sorts when it comes to freedom of expression. The impact is so much that there is virtually no gap between have's and have not's when it comes to video logging. 

So does that mean we are witnessing a moment of truth , the beginning of end of blogging as we know it ? I don't know, but I am reading less and less blogs and watching more and more videos and may be learning significantly faster than ever before and learning more.

Be it a small DIY project, home improvement, cooking a new dish or a full course in say digital designing, I have a video tutorial available to learn and shine.

While the vlogging is a clearly a better medium of the two and is certainly  threatening the habit of reading, the latter on the other hand can be an immersive, meditative and enriching experience. It would always attract to the niche, and the genuinely interested readers would be reading the blog for the intellectual simulation that reading provides and may be also for the love and  shear love for this amazing medium. Newspapers survived TV era precisely because of this love in my humble opinion. Though paper newspapers aren't fighting  the online paper /e-news /twitter  onslaught that well.

Rapid digitisation and the ease of use and the amount of money being offered through Ad sense, affiliate marketing and other means is posing a threat to the blogging community as we know it and vloggers are taking over much faster than we can think from those who proudly used to call themselves bloggers.

So is blogging dead? No it isn't and it will survive I am sure. Say, you are a highly motivated blogger and are seeing a downward trend , then you ought to look at vlogging as an aid and not a competitor to your blogs. Vlogging is a crowd puller and you can use that medium to generate interest in what is your passion. Much of the traffic can be diverted back to blog, especially the people who want to dig deeper for details would not mind getting redirected to another source of information if the same promises to provide more details/additional information to the seeker. 

Getting creative on youtube can in fact help make your blog more successful. Your video content can be used as a very potent marketing tool and should be seen as that only, if blogging is your real love. It might be that you are dividing your time between videos and blogging but at the end of the day , you are spending time doing what excites you. 

For the naysayers , even if it doesn't help in generating too much traffic, at least jumping on the vlogging bandwagon will help a blogger understand what is all the fuss about :).