I've always enjoyed writing as a form of creative expression. Back when I was an undergraduate student I created my first blog (remember Blogger?), and over the next 10 years or so I wrote in several different blogs as my interests changed.
It was the heyday of blogging back then. Many of my university friends had blogs as well, and we all linked to each other on our personally-designed blogs, left comments and had discussions on each others’ posts. It was a great time.
And then the Internet started to change. People began making videos about their daily lives, sharing their thoughts and opinions on camera, while blogs slowly became less popular. Videos as a medium for content creation became even more commonplace as our smartphones started shipping with better cameras. And as the landscape changed, so too did audience preferences. Many people today, especially among the younger generation, would rather watch a video than read something online (as evidenced by the popularity of TikTok).
I never really considered doing YouTube back when it was starting to pick up steam. I always preferred writing. But as the popularity of video content kept growing, I decided to give it a try, and so I launched my YouTube channel just over a year ago. I started off just doing POV vlogs to show glimpses of my life as a university lecturer. Eventually, I got in front of the camera and started talking about my life as a university lecturer.
I gave it a good go for just over a year, but I think I'm going to revert back to my preferred creative outlet - writing. Making videos was quite enjoyable for a while, until it began to feel like a chore. Writing happens so much more naturally for me. Maybe I got back into writing after my faculty organised a workshop for writing media articles. Since then I’ve had seven articles published in various media outlets (which you can see on my homepage), and now I feel like writing (blogging) again.
I won’t delete my YouTube channel. I’m still gonna leave my videos up, and I’ll use it to upload my talks, webinars, or anything more substantial than a vlog. And if I get an itch to make a short video, Instagram reels will suffice. But for my day-to-day (maybe not as frequent) outlet, I’ll be blogging from now on.