Watching videos is like an order of magnitude easier than reading for large swathes of the population. Fully 18% of the US adult population is functionally illiterate – they can pass a reading test, but their reading level is so low it hardly matters. These folks can still watch YouTube/Dystopian Vine (sorry, TikTok).

Also, this much is just my own speculation, but A/V media is a lot easier to push people’s emotional buttons with because it’s much, much faster and easier to consume content via video and we’re likely hardwired to pay more attention to audio/visual stimuli than abstract imagery in our heads. A video+audio track of an explosion is always going to hit people harder than a careful description of the same explosion, and if people expect it to be easier and to provide a larger emotional impact, they’re more likely to go for the thing that makes them feel something more easily.

We are all governed by dopamine more than we like to admit.