THIS WEEK: VIDEO KILLED THE BLOGOSPHERE

🌟 Editor's Note

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🤖 Bots Read. People Watch.

Every change in the world takes time to fully come into being. And by the time it finally clicks into place (so you notice it), the shift almost feels inevitable —like the world was always this way.

Marketers have been predicting the shift from reading to watching for decades, but it’s safe to say the future is well and truly here now. People rarely read blog posts anymore; and what they do read, they skim.

But people watch 2.5 hours of video every day, on average, vs less than 30 minutes spent reading. That’s 912.5 hours of video each year, compared to only 182.5 hours of reading.

Bots read. People watch.

People love video because it feels authentic (even when it’s not). But they also love it because it’s passive and easy to consume. It’s multimodal and convenient. Video entertains while serving other purposes; which makes it a powerful marketing channel.

Marketers know and love the branding value of video, but what not enough marketers are considering (yet) is that it is increasingly a search channel as well (which is driven by intent).

⚙️ Video As An Intent Marketing Channel

Marketers value traffic from search because it is high-intent, meaning rich with implied intention (to answer a question, to solve a problem, to buy something, to hire someone, etc).

This is also very true about video.

Video is also a highly-reusable asset. Like square imagery on social, one asset can be reused across multiple platforms easily.

And best of all, with video you get both engaged views from humans and the SEO/AI citation benefits of being easy for bots to index. Currently this is mostly by indexing video transcripts but will, increasingly, be bots watching videos and assessing their visual details as well.

Without indulging in speculation about the future though, video content already produces these SEO benefits:

• Fast indexation

• Link/authority-building

• Special features in the SERPs

• Frequent appearance in AI citations

• Easy multi-platform distribution

📹 How I Plan To Use Video In 2026

Video is the center of my 2026 strategy at Subscribe And Grow, my lead gen service for local businesses. Even in the local space, video is increasingly a requirement for marketing your business.

Video is essential for every vertical from e-commerce to B2B tech. From product reviews to explainer videos and everything in between, video has been a valuable edition to your marketing arsenal for years.

But now it’s not just relevant for brand marketing —it’s also a key part of a holistic SEO strategy.

I’ll be selling this as a social media offering but it’s really SEO/GEO and content marketing in disguise. Because every platform loves video and either prioritizes it natively (when posted directly on the platform) or streamlines embedding it from YouTube.

Video is easy to repurpose, to turn into multiple clips or vertical shorts, and the same format works across multiple platforms.

All of this means that starting your content marketing strategy with video, then using the transcript to produce blog posts, articles, social media, graphics, and so on to promote each video effectively creates a white-to-grey-hat tiered-linking network.

For each video I’m going to repurpose the content and post to:

1. YouTube Shorts - vertical clips promoting long horizontal video

2. TikTok - reuse vertical clips, link in bio

3. Instagram Reels - reuse vertical clips, link in bio

4. Facebook Reels - reuse vertical clips, link in comments

5. LinkedIn (Video) - reuse long horizontal video, link in comments

6. X (Video) - reuse long horizontal video, link in comments

7. Blog - generate from transcript, embed video, link internally

8. Medium - generate related post, embed video, link to blog/parasites

9. Blogger - generate related post, embed video, link to blog/parasites

10. LinkedIn (Article) - generate related post, embed video, link to parasites

11. X (Article) - generate related post, embed video, link to parasites

12. Beehiiv - post promoting the video with embed, link to homepage

13. Substack - post promoting the video with embed, link to homepage

14. Facebook Page (Post) - promote blog post with link

15. Reddit - generate listicle, advice, or question/answer, link video

16. Quora - generate as question/answer, link video

17. X (Post) - promote blog post with link

18. Threads - promote blog post with link

19. Pinterest - pin of infographic based on blog post

20. Perplexity - question/answer saved as public page

By linking them all together (as if I were creating “internal links” but between these SEO parasites) I’ll be distributing 20+ solid 80-99 DR links per piece of content to signal both trustworthiness and freshness (two essential ranking signals)

Rolling this out for multiple clients is a big undertaking, I need to generate a steady supply of content (and b-roll) relevant to each client’s search strategy, repurpose it to a variety of formats, and post to each platform (many of which require manual actions).

But this will generate tons of trust, relevance, and freshness signals from high-authority sites while also producing dozens of new opportunities to attract organic traffic as well.

😈 Steal This Strategy For Success In 2026

Google struggles to penalize SEO parasites because it relies on high authority sites for so many ranking signals. It’s the most resilient organic strategy available to us right now because it’s like using a drone swarm against a sniper —you win through overwhelming force.

But achieving the scale of repurposing and posting to all these platforms is a beast of a task, so I’ll keep you posted as I crack the code for each.

For now, I leave you with this thought:

Content marketing is far from dead, but it does look very different. We serve two (types of) masters now: people and bots.

To achieve the volume necessary to influence both audiences, every piece of content needs to be repurposed into as many platforms as possible: multimedia and social platforms for reaching people, and text/blogging platforms for signaling to bots.

If you like this idea but don’t have time to execute it in your business, let’s talk. I’m working hard to streamline this and provide it as a service.

Nathan Binford
AI & Marketing Strategist

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