One of the basic rules of writing is: “Show, don’t tell.” Nowhere is that becoming more applicable than on the Internet.

When Google bought YouTube many of us wondered why such an incredibly profitable company as Google, a company already rich in eyeballs, would buy a company that was losing money. In fact, up to that point YouTube had no clear revenue model. More than one person asked, “YouTube has pretty cool technology, but how are they going to make money?” The answer to that question is starting to reveal itself.

Google has long recognized the trend that more and more people are selecting the Internet over television and print as their preferred source for entertainment and, more recently, their preferred source for news and information. It’s more than a bad economy that is causing newspapers across the country to fold, it’s a behavioral trend brought on by competition from the Internet.

The subtext to this trend is: As a society, we no longer want to read. We’d prefer to have things explained to us and nothing explains anything quite as well as pictures. We are visual creatures, after all, and by definition video is a visual experience.

Back to Google; specifically Google Gaudi. Gaudi stands for Google Audio Indexing. In simple terms, Gaudi uses voice recognition software to locate search words and phrases inside videos, such as Google Video and YouTube, just like Google searches through HTML text looking for words and phrases in websites. The dawn of a new era of search capability has risen.

Most companies have invested in a website. Few have done anything (SEO) to insure that website can easily be found by prospective customers and current customers. That makes no sense to me, but I digress. Those that care about maximizing the return on their web-investment should begin investing in video. Advances in technology have made video more affordable. Stated another way, in today’s world you can buy a lot of technology for a reasonable amount of money and that is what the smart money is doing.