No, it's due to monetization of videos. A 10-minute YouTube video can get you $$$. A print article on some blog you write MAYBE gets you a banner ad that MAYBE somebody clicks on, but that ship kinda sailed years ago.
Short term, videos yield better bang for buck, but long term? lol.
I own a few websites, and I have content I wrote back in 2005 that still makes money to this day. Long term, my written articles pull ahead of videos, despite videos having more views. I actually looked at this for the first time back in 2016, and looking at it now, it still applies. Videos can grab a ton of views in a short period of time, which makes bank. Written articles tend to be more organic, take time to grow and rank in the search engines, but make greater amounts of cash. An article with 500k of readers will generate far more cash from clicks and views (mostly clicks) in the US than a video with the same amount of views. However, an article may take 3 years to hit that point, while a video might take a week or two (this specific scenario, with both article and video covering the same content, is one of the things I looked at. Article was written in 2007 and video was released in 2015. Article generated 3.5x the amount of ad revenue as the video). Note that after the initial rush, absent a video going viral, views slow to a crawl, while readers (uniques and to a lesser extent, page views) for an article do not.
I actually created a Youtube channel to post videos along with the content I've written. Videos are 1:1 to the article in question. Comparing ONLY that data and ONLY for articles written after the channel was created and that had videos, the text outperformed the video 5.625:1. HOWEVER, I made no attempt to market the videos (or the text, search engines can index text, however, videos cannot be accurately indexed, even if they seemingly have subtitles.)
I suspect the bigger issue is cash now vs. cash in 10 years. If offered you $250 in 2 months or $1,400 in 10 years, which would you take? Nevermind the fact that 5 years later, that $1,400 becomes $2,000 or whatever, and the video only makes $400 or so.
Also, I won't blanket bash YouTubers. Some, like Steve from Gamer's Nexus, do an AMAZING job. However, I personally like to be able to read at my own pace, and maybe even do some research about the product outside the article.
Note that I can't post dollar amounts here due to partnership agreements. Also note that Amazon, with its super profitable affiliates program along with the 'sponsorships' that are so prevalent on videos these days are not included.
Finally, half of the websites I own/write content for/operate have optional subscription memberships that remove ads and do little else (mostly cosmetic things like badges, and a few things like priority support, recognition, etc.). These subscriptions beat all ad views from either media type. 1 person paying $2-$5/mo will trump 1,000 video viewers or article readers (depending on the niche, however, 1:1000, so...)
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