Comment by emn13

I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way.

In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.