Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble at Video on the Net
Just finished watching an interesting debate between Robert Scoble of Scobeleizer and Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.
The debate centered on the issues of 'quality content' and content marketing, but perhaps more so... text versus video.
While perhaps not the easiest audience (it was an Internet TV conference), Mike Arrington said what many people in the room know if they are honest with themselves - that producing video content is much more labour intensive than text.
From his perspective, the effort to edit video is simply not worth the investment for him personally, or worth the expense of hiring people to help him "at this stage..."
"I can write an article in 30 mins, and that provides a much higher return on investment than the (effort) involved in editing video", he said. He has a point.
Robert Scoble had a different perspective, but then as he said "I have a 6 figure deal from Seagate to do it". Michael Arrington quipped "How many times do you need to say the word Seagate today?"
It is certainly true that video is a lot more effort to produce and edit, assuming you give a crap about the production values. Working in TV we used to spend a day or two shooting 1 to 2 hours of footage and then a week doing post production. All this for a 4 minute story.
Running a blog is a different proposition but the challenges remain. I still haven't got round to editing some rather cool footage I shot in the former USSR, and that was 2 weeks ago. With each passing day it gets less relevant.
An interesting debate and intriguing to hear both speakers in person.
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