If you make content online, here's the problem

It was fun while it lasted

Prisoners Exercising, Vincent van Gogh

If you, like me, are that most shameful of beasts, “the online content creator”, then you need to read this.

But even if you’re lucky enough to make your money in a more dignified way, I’d still recommend giving it a skim — because what’s happening in this space is happening everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree.

This is the story of the “creator movement”, yes, but it’s also the story of how markets evolve, and how businesses need to adapt at each stage of that evolution.

Here I’m going to lay out:

• What’s happening

• What it means

• What to do about it

Let’s get on with it.

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I. What’s happening

To get yourself in the right headspace, I want you to cast your mind back to the heady days of 2021.

We’d all had our IRL existences obliterated by Covid and all the bullshit around it, and had moved the better part of our consciousness online, where an entirely new world was being built.

It’s strange to think of it now, but the pre-Covid internet was actually pretty underdeveloped. It was little more than a support function for our offline lives, and didn’t really exist as a “place” in its own right.

It was a colonial outpost. A frontier. And like all such places, there was money to be made by prospectors and speculators willing to take a risk.

In the business world we called these prospectors “content creators”.

Although in consumer domains like makeup and fitness, “influencers” had been around for a while, the same logic hadn’t really been applied to B2B. And so when the early pioneers started testing the waters — in an online space that contained millions of bored, locked-down professionals — they discovered a rich seam of virgin gold that completely changed the business landscape forever.

You know the names of these people, of course.

Justin Welsh.
Alex Hormozi.
Dan Koe.
Etc.

All brilliant at what they do, but even more importantly, early to do it.

At that time the ratio of available attention to units of content was insanely skewed, so almost anything vaguely engaging and well crafted was guaranteed to get momentum. Although he has of course moved on now, if you look back at the early Justin Welsh material, it’s incredible to think how little effort was required to gather a million followers.

This is not remotely a criticism — quite the opposite — for Welsh, Koe, Hormozi and the rest did not get their rewards for quality (nobody ever does), but for scarcity. For giving people something they wanted at a time when there wasn’t much of that stuff about.

I just want to emphasise this point a little.

The game was never making content.
The game was never educating and inspiring.
The game was never hacking the algorithm.

The game was always what all business games are:

Having the courage and vision to do something of value that other people aren’t doing, or haven’t noticed yet.

So, with that in mind, what do you think happened next?

Well, everyone copied them.

Including me.

I entered the game in 2023, by which point we’d already entered the second phase of online content creation, which we might call “refinement”.

Phase 1: Prospecting
Phase 2: Refinement

At this point the ratio of attention to content was less favourable, but still pretty good. There was still more demand than supply. However, as competition had increased, the quality bar was raised. No longer could you simply put out some inspirational aphorism and get 8,000 likes; you now had to produce richer, higher value, more tightly produced material to compete. This was of course the era of the dreaded “LinkedIn carousel”, which was really my jam.

Now, one thing you’ll notice almost invariably about “phase 2” market entrants like myself is that they routinely have fewer followers than those from “phase 1”.

And rightly so.

The visionaries and risk-takers should get the spoils, and the copycats should only achieve modest returns — and if you look around, that’s very much been the case. Off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone with followers in the millions who started later than 2021/22, because you needed that initial scarcity to get that kinda boost.

Speaking for myself, I had about 2 years of attention surplus to exploit — which garnered me about 130,000 followers on LinkedIn. Not too shabby, but nothing epic. Good for marketing offline services, but not enough to build one of those content-to-course money printing machines everyone’s chasing after.

Nevertheless, let me tell you, these times were good! If you could write decent stuff at high volume, it was easy. And under other circumstances, I think we would have remained in this phase for a long time. Possibly forever. Because after all, the key factor was always:

Is there more available attention than there is quality content?

Or, to put it in broader terms:

Is there more demand than there is supply?

And since creating good content is difficult — very few people have the chops to maintain both insight and volume over an extended period — I think the demand surplus would have always remained.

But then we got AI.

Ah.

I don’t think I need to explain the effect this had on the industry. One word will do it: saturation.

It took a year or two for the technology and its users to meld in the optimal way, but we now find ourselves in phase 3, where there is simply not enough attention to spread across all the attention-worthy content.

Phase 1: Prospecting
Phase 2: Refinement
Phase 3: Saturation

This saturation has spread across platforms in sequence of how easy it is for AI to produce content for them. That’s why X was the canary in the coal mine. It’s probably been 18 months, maybe longer, since people on there started noticing that their tweets were getting no impressions.

Why?

Because there are only a finite number of impressions to go around. And with industrial engagement farms working at full tilt, it simply didn’t matter how good a tweet you put out: if nobody saw it, it couldn’t perform.

LinkedIn — another predominantly text-based platform — was next. For about a year, people on there have been complaining about the “new algorithm”, when in fact I’m not sure the algorithm has anything to do with it. There’s just too much supply. And this hasn’t been helped by LinkedIn’s suicidal policy of actively encouraging AI content production, which has accelerated to such a degree that it’s not even clear if there are any humans left on the platform anymore.

Platforms with higher production barriers like Instagram and YouTube are a little more immune, but they too have experienced an explosion of supply, and are probably both the wrong side of the attention-to-content ratio.

And so this is where we find ourselves today.

Too much content.
Too few eyeballs.

…but with everyone still frantically running the same playbook from 2023, which assumes there is still space in the market.

If you’re finding this game kinda shitty at the moment, this is why.

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II. What this means

Now there are some lessons that hold in saturated markets — and you’re not going to like any of them. But they must be understood in order to be countered.

Here’s the reality.

1. If you’re just starting now, it won’t work

Yes, I’m sure there will be exceptions, but basically if you think you can just start cold-posting on LinkedIn or Substack or X or whatever and grow a big audience and personal brand… you won’t. It doesn’t even matter if you’re producing epic content, because there is already more epic content than there are people to view it.

I’m on Substack now (a saturation refugee from LinkedIn, like many others), and I’d say there’s tonnes of great material on there getting barely any traction. When I see it in the feed, my general reaction is “hey, that looks good, but I can’t be arsed to read it.” In fact it’s worse than that — it’s more like “that looks good, but it’s probably someone using AI to manipulate me, so I won’t bother.” There’s just too much good stuff, which in practice means there is no good stuff anymore.

The only way I’m reading something is if there’s an extremely strong trust signal — which basically means it’s been written or boosted by someone I’ve heard of. Otherwise my default position is scepticism.

In such an environment, making it as a “nobody” is nearly impossible.

2. The whales will maintain their position

The sort-of good news — at least for some — is that if you were big before the saturation, you will probably stay big.

That’s largely because of the trust issue. With this insane surplus of content, audiences need some method to curate and filter what’s out there — and name recognition is going to be the primary way they do that.

This effectively means that big creators become their own media companies, with a similarly sticky audience to what something like Vice or Buzzfeed would have had a decade ago. I’d expect this to be compounded as more and more people become overwhelmed by the volume of content, and retreat to a smaller number of trusted sources to manage the deluge.

Imagine a future where the average person reads something like:

• One newspaper

• Two magazines

• Three creators

…and that’s the majority of their media diet. In this world the big guys stay big, and breaking into that cartel is roughly as easy as launching a new online magazine. Not something you can just do in your spare time.

3. People will lose interest in social media

This is a bit more speculative, but I think the signs are already bubbling up.

With the erosion of trust I mentioned, people will start to question the value of any media source that is “open” and uncurated. The fact that there might be tonnes of awesome content on there won’t prevent this trend — it will accelerate it — because remember the golden rule:

When something is abundant, it loses value.

It doesn’t matter how “good” it is. If there’s too much of it, nobody wants it anymore. And the same applies to a world-class piece of content.

What all this means is that not only have we used up all the attention out there — it might actually be shrinking. Demand is dropping perhaps as fast as supply is growing.

It sucks!

But there are flickers of hope…

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III. What to do about it

I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture here, but with reason.

The lesson I want to impress on you goes far beyond content creation, and is something human beings are exceptionally bad at grasping:

Do not invest in markets with oversupply and zero barrier to entry.

It’s not rocket science, but even so it hasn’t quite sunk in — because not too long ago there were almost zero industries with these dynamics. For the whole of the 20th century, demand was greater than supply in most domains, and so we instinctively assume that’s the norm. Mountains of business literature and best practice are built on the assumption of demand. But it’s not the norm anymore. Saturation is befalling one market after another.

So, if I were advising you from a purely strategic perspective, I’d just say: do something else!

However, I appreciate that in the case of content creation, this isn’t only a strategic question. A lot of people are playing this game not just because they think it’s “a good way to make money”, but because they are thinkers and experts who see this as their art. They love to create, write, and move their discipline forward. They love to share ideas, to grow, to learn, and they see content creation as a vehicle for that process.

Heck, I am one of these people.

So am I saying that people like us can no longer create? That there’s no point in thought leadership? That knowledge in all domains has become ossified? That we all just have to shut up and start laying bricks instead?

No.

We can still do this.
We can still think.
We can still write.
We can still create.
We can still influence.
We can even still become famous doing it.

But the way we do it must change.

The key thing to understand about content creation and thought leadership in the post-saturation economy is the thing I’ve been saying all through this essay:

If it’s not difficult, it won’t work.

The entire reason it’s stopped working is because it’s become too easy, letting too many people into the market. So the trick to making it work again is to make it hard again.

Again let me stress this point. Before AI, not many people were playing this game well because not many people could write or speak to a high enough standard. You had to actually earn it. Having thousands of people listen to your thoughts is not a human right. It is, definitionally, elitist. Only a tiny subset of people can ever achieve it, and AI doesn’t change that one bit.

In fact, here’s a real truth bomb if you want to hear it:

If you need AI to play this game, then this game isn’t for you.

If you only started doing this after AI “enabled” you to, then I’m sorry, but you don’t have what it takes. Your genius lies elsewhere. It’s like if Nike released some sneakers that let you jump 10 feet in the air. Someone like me could say “wow, now I can play in the NBA!” — only I can’t, because everyone who was already good at basketball also has those sneakers. It’s a wash.

So our goal is to do things in a way that locks as many other people out as possible. There are three ways to do this:

1. Making it unfair.

2. Making it tedious.

3. Making it expensive.

Preferably all at once. Here’s what I mean:

Unfair

If you want to create content, you have to do it in a way that leverages your unfair advantages, whatever they might be. In the past, for many people this was simply “being able to write” or “being able to come up with ideas” — but AI has put paid to that.

Fortunately there are other unfair advantages we might possess, such as:

• Being a fantastic speaker

• Being really good on camera

• Being associated with a big brand name

• Having a significant qualification or job title

• Knowing famous people you can interview

• Having a column in a popular magazine

• Or maybe just being fantastically attractive

The point is that there are many AI-proof advantages we might have that allow us to cut through and establish trust. You need to start by taking stock of your advantages, then tailoring your content creation to deploy them.

For example, if you’ve worked with many top-level CEOs, it might make sense to interview them and borrow their credibility. Or if you’re a fantastic speaker, it makes sense to hit the speaking circuit hard and establish a real-world presence.

What you don’t want to do is default to what everyone can do — that being pithy bits of text on social media platforms. That’s fine as part of the mix, but it’s not sufficient on its own.

Tedious

Next, we need to add friction into the mix.

What can we do that is so laborious that most other people simply won’t bother? Again, in the past, simply writing a lot passed this threshold — but not anymore. So we need to seek out different, more demanding ways of standing out (especially if we lack unfair advantages). For example:

• Commissioning original research to write about

• Doing the hard yards to get dozens of conference bookings

• Writing a proper book and getting it published

• Producing exceptionally high-production-value video content

• Securing interviews with well-known figures

• Etc.

All of these are, in their own ways, boring, time-consuming, and by no means guaranteed to succeed. And that, of course, is precisely why they have the potential to reward you. If you lack credibility and outstanding raw talent, then tedium is going to be your best shot at getting noticed.

Expensive

Finally, and most unwelcome of all, you’re going to need to spend money.

A big reason for the saturation problem is that people somehow got it into their heads that content marketing is “free marketing” — so we can be fairly sure that most people out there aren’t spending much money on polluting the airwaves. That’s an opportunity for us.

Ways you might spend money include:

• World-class editing

• Shooting video on location around the world

• Paying to get yourself to speaking gigs

• Holding your own events

• Commissioning professional research

• Buying ads or paid exposure

• Hiring a team to help increase volume

• Hiring elite-level copywriters

• Etc.

As I’ve written about before, most people today have been conditioned to think that good things come cheaply — and that simply isn’t the case. Which is good news for those of us who aren’t tight-fisted.

But what about normal posting?

To be perfectly clear, all of the above is in addition to normal 2023-style posting. I still think you should be doing that — not because it’s going to drive much growth, but because it remains a priceless technique for building fluency and testing ideas.

What the dopes using AI to do all their stuff will never understand is that the root purpose of creating content is to integrate your ideas into your own consciousness, so you become an intellectual beast in the real world.

You remember that place? The one where you still have to look other human beings in the eye, be warm, quick, helpful, and actually demonstrate competence?

Yes, that real world.

You are doing this stuff, first and foremost, to perform there. So that if I shoved you onto a stage in front of 5,000 people, you could wow them off-the-cuff — because you know your shit so damn well.

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So to wrap up: some of you may be thinking that you can’t do what I’ve described. Or that you don’t want to.

Great.

If you feel that, then I’ve done my job. Because it means I’ve described a strategy with a degree of built-in scarcity. And therefore it’s a strategy that might just work.

We are living through a moment in time where base standards in every industry are rising faster than most people can adapt. And instead of “lifting all boats”, people are drowning in the tide — because they don’t notice it until the water’s over their head.

I wrote this essay in an attempt to stop that happening to you.

And if I’m honest? Myself too.

I’m ready to make things difficult. And I hope some of you will roll up your sleeves and join me.