Explainer videos are dark patterns that replaced written howto documents in order to serve ads. Not seeing them pop up any more in search results is one of the few positive outcomes of Google switching to AI-first search results.
Instead we've worked out how to get the LLM to make videos.
Neither gives any guarantee. Both static text and videos can be done well and badly. But I usually find it useful to have both. A video is like being guided through their vision of what the thing is (a "push" message). This can be annoying to many nerd types who want to cut through all that and just want to "pull" the info they need, for themselves, at their own fast pace, quickly identifying it and not being spoonfed. But the typical user is not like this, and prefers the spoonfed/edutained approach.
Yes that's the trick. And much more. If you have any sort of content, you should express it as a slideshow, a white paper, a blog post, a video, a podcast, etc. Get it out in as many forms as you can. Maybe even performative dance or song if you've got that energy.
Needless to say, usually if my choices are video or nothing, I'll choose nothing and figure it out myself.
Video that cover different parts of an outline are a great use of videos. Videos that try to cover too much all in one are a lesser use. Yes, you can use scrub to find in a video, but showing a text outline and letting users click to reveal videos for specifics topics works very well.
It's particularly good for those frustrating recipe videos where they don't tell you quantities of ingredients to use - you can have Gemini hallucinate the quantities and it normally gets them about right.
Plus having the video file means I can extract frames as images at specific timestamps.
Homely though the ask feature is probably fit for purpose, at least on YouTube.
I love using notebookLM for orientation stuff.