Not long ago, if you wanted to learn something new, you turned on the TV.
Then came the rise of blogs and digital media platforms—bringing knowledge to your fingertips, one article at a time. That era defined the golden age of online publishing.
But, we have evolved again.
Today, audiences discover and learn on platforms like YouTube, where content is dynamic, visual, and, crucially, engaging. At the same time, social media has exploded, but it’s built for attention, not depth. A 10-second story or a 30-second reel is great for a laugh or a product tease. But when your brand has something meaningful to say, when you need to educate, convince or establish yourself as a thought leader, two formats currently dominate: articles and long-form YouTube videos.
Here’s the catch: they are not equally effective.
In this article, we compare performance data from two of Southeast Asia’s legacy tech publications—e27 and Tech in Asia—with our YouTube channel, Asia Tech Podcast, for the month of June 2025.
To understand the impact of one piece of content (either an article or a video), we will focus on two core metrics:
- Reach: the total number of views of the piece of content
- Engagement: the average time spent per reader or viewer on that piece of content
And to simplify it further, we will combine both into one ultimate metric:
- Total Impact: the total time spent by all readers or viewers combined
Summary: Total Impact for 1 Piece of Content
| Metric | e27 | Tech in Asia | Asia Tech Podcast |
| Reach | 785 | 1,517 | 35,000 |
| Engagement | 24 seconds | 29 seconds | 6 minutes and 12 seconds |
| Total Impact | 5.2 hours | 12.2 hours | 3,600 hours |
The Bottom line: to match the total impact of just one video on the Asia Tech Podcast, you would need 692 articles on e27 or 295 articles on Tech in Asia.
Note: Since we don’t have access to internal analytics from e27 or Tech in Asia, we used public traffic data from Similarweb and made very generous assumptions in their favor. In reality, the numbers are likely to be much lower.
Assumption made: 100% of their traffic in June went only to the new articles published in June. This is obviously not the case. Significant traffic also went to their home page and to the older articles, but for the sake of this article we will make this assumption.
How Online Articles Engage the Audience
First, let’s look at e27:
Source: Similarweb, June 2025
Results for e27 in June 2025:
- e27 published 322 articles in June 2025, averaging 10.7 articles/day
- 138,942 people visited the site in June 2025 (Including all sources of traffic: organic, ads, newsletter, social media, etc… )
- Each visitor spent an average of 44 seconds on the website in total, and during this time they visited 1.82 pages on average
- 1.82 pages/visit means that they got 252,875 total articles views
- All readers combined spent a total of 1,700 hours reading e27 in June 2025, including all the content available on their website (not only the ones published in June 2025)
Impact for one article published in June:
- Each article average 785 views (under our assumption that 100% of the traffic went to new articles only)
- Average read time per article: 24 seconds per reader
- Total time spent on a one article combing all the readers: 5 hours 14 minutes
Now consider Tech in Asia:
Source: Similarweb, June 2025
Results for Tech in Asia in June 2025:
- Tech in Asia published approximately 1,500 articles in June, averaging around 50 articles/day
- 902,480 people visited the site in June 2025 (Including all sources of traffic: organic, ads, newsletter, social media, etc…)
- Each visitor spent an average of 69 seconds on the website in total, and during this time they visited 2.37 pages on average
- 2.37 pages/visit means that they got 2,139,114.6 total articles views
- All readers combined spent a total of 17,300 hours reading Tech in Asia in June 2025, including all the content available on their website (not only the ones published in June 2025)
Impact for one article published in June:
- Each article average 1,517 views (under our assumption that 100% of the traffic went to new articles only)
- Average read time per article: 29 seconds per reader
- Total time spent on a one article combing all the readers: 12.2 hours
How the Asia Tech Podcast Engaged its Audience in June
The Asia Tech Podcast published 5 videos in June:
- These 5 videos received 175,172 views in total
- All viewers combined spent a total of 18,300 hours watching the 5 videos of the Asia Tech Podcast published in June 2025
In other words, the 5 videos of the Asia Tech Podcast published in June got more total watch time (18,300 hours) than all the articles ever published on e27 (1,700 hours) and Tech in Asia (17,300 hours).
Impact for one video of the Asia Tech Podcast:
- 35,000 average views per video (This is not an estimate. This is based on accurate data from YouTube Studio for each video.)
- Each viewer spent an average of 6 minutes and 12 seconds watching the videos.
- The average total watch time per video combining all the viewers: 3,600 hours
Source: YouTube Studio, June 2025
Episode 372:
- 36,310 views
- 5 minutes and 49 seconds of average watch time per viewer
- 3,500 hours of total watch time
Episode 373:
- 35,942 views
- 5 minutes and 57 seconds of average watch time per viewer
- 3,600 hours of total watch time
Episode 374:
- 33,475 views (and counting)
- 7 minutes and 03 seconds of average watch time per viewer
- 3,900 hours of total watch time
Episode 375:
- 31,500 views (and counting)
- 7 minutes and 52 seconds of average watch time per viewer
- 4,100 hours of total watch time
Episode 376:
- 37,944 views
- 5 minutes and 01 seconds of average watch time per viewer
- 3,200 hours of total watch time
Why this Gap Is So Big
The difference in impact between a YouTube video and a written article isn’t just about format. It’s about how content is created and consumed.
Both e27 and Tech in Asia publish a huge volume of content every month:
- e27 published 322 articles in June, approximately 11 per day
- Tech in Asia published ~1,500 articles, approximately 50 per day
This firehose of content comes with consequences:
- Discoverability is low: when 10 to 50 new articles go live daily, even great pieces get buried within hours
- Quality is diluted:
- On e27, just three in-house writers produced over 100 articles, including branded content. That is more than 1 article per day per writer, every day.
- On Tech in Asia, the vast majority of articles are written by AI, with an unknown level of editorial oversight.
In contrast, Asia Tech Podcast released just five episodes in June.
Each one was crafted, edited, and distributed with care by our team, featuring real conversations with real human experts.
And while legacy tech sites chase volume, ATP’s videos go deep, drive real engagement, and generate thousands of hours of watch time.
That is the power of focus over frequency, and quality over quantity.
So if your brand has something meaningful to say, the question is NOT whether to publish content.
The real question is: where will it actually be seen and remembered?