Earlz, I don't think that people aren't willing to pay for a well written article. Take a look at self-published Amazon Kindle e-books. Some of them are as shor

Earlz, I don't think that people aren't willing to pay for a well written article. Take a look at self-published Amazon Kindle e-books. Some of them are as short as 20 pages and as cheap as 99 cents. And many have been insanely successful. But that's besides the point. In general, you're right. A lot of screencasts out there suck. And as you clearly exemplify, a lot of people learn better from text than video. Which is precisely why screencasts need their own platform independent from a pure video hosting service like YouTube. We support full Github-style markdown and code syntax highlighting, and we encourage all content producers to pair their videos with annotations that are sufficient enough to stand alone (similar to what Ryan Bates does with Railscasts/AsciiCasts). And we think that a unified platform which sets that standard will help make it the norm rather than an exception.