Content for content's sake
Flip through any newspaper and there will be a clear divide between pieces that clearly took substantial amounts of effort, and other pieces that were written just to fill the page. Gone is the era of “All the news that’s fit to print”. Gone are the space constraints. Gone is the cost to produce a physical product. Instead, the canvas is limitless, and the only thing that matters is the order in which content is presented. In the morning, a guess, by the afternoon, stories with the most traction have risen to the top.
I noticed this recently when reading a story about a Navy Seal operation reported by the New York Times. A massive (and controversial) piece that was the lead story first thing in the morning in the digital edition. Such a complex and lengthy piece would have taken a substantial amount of effort to produce; writers need to get paid, lawyers would have been consulted, and gathering sources would have taken weeks. Later in the day, the piece had been dropped to second or third place, replaced by a story about something breaking happening that day. A similar effect will occur within the opinion section, in which the order of writers will fluctuate, presumably based on how each piece is doing relative to the others. I wondered about the incentives at play, was all that expense seen as worth it for a story that didn’t end up trending?
Stripping down the content ecosystem’s dynamics into basic components, we can see some essential building blocks of the relationship. As a subscriber, I have an expectation that I pay a particular amount for a month, and in return, I have something to watch, read, or listen to when I open the app. To illustrate this better, imagine that your favourite publication stated “we’re taking a break for a month to do work for stories next month”. Would you pay the subscription fee? The amount of time of entertainment you get from reading those future pieces will be the same regardless of their quality, so you will be paying the same amount for half the reading/watching/listening time. Are we paying for quality, or time entertained?
There is no way for me to define what quality content looks like for you (or anyone else), so instead I want to define it based on a simple metric that we can more easily estimate from characteristics of a piece. I will use the resources (time, money, and trust) that a publication or individual puts into a piece to be a proxy for quality.
The quality tension
To start, I’ll use an example from The Globe and Mail about a supposed date between Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. Incredibly short, very few sources, and no investigative work, fitting pretty nicely into our definition of low-quality content. Yet, the story would have been shared and viewed more than most other pieces that ran in the paper that day. From a business perspective, is it a good return on investment?
I would argue, yes, it is, for a particular portion of the reader base. For those that are not subscribed (and thus not paying), the increased ad revenue and exposure to the paper was almost certainly worth the one hour of labour. For paying subscribers, it might be a different story. This news was available for free from a myriad of outlets, thus introducing a feeling of “why am I paying for this?”.
This tension is central to how I’ve come to think about content generation. Low-quality pieces that generate high returns are used to generate the revenue for the high-quality pieces that define the brand. If you can build an audience that has characteristics that advertisers desire (such as higher purchasing power, or particular niche interest in a topic), or a high subscription fee, then the purpose of higher-quality pieces is to retain that audience.
Frequency matters
Daily YouTube vloggers used to be incredibly popular in the 2010’s. Each and every day, without fail, they would vlog about what they did, where they went, and who they spent time with. This put a huge amount of pressure on the content creators, but it also created an expectation and a habit in those that subscribed to the channel. For many, they arrived home from work and instantly went to YouTube to catch up on the day’s video.
In a world drowning in content, consistently reminding your audience that you exist can be a struggle in and of itself. “It’s a slow news day” doesn’t cut it, because another publication will fill that void with predictions about the future or opinions about the present. Even the largest and wealthiest newsrooms don’t have the capacity to produce ground-breaking stories every day, for smaller teams that challenge is even harder. A report from the Spiegal Research Center finds that “[the] frequency of website visits is the most important predictor of subscriber retention”. As AI generation is making the subscriber model even more essential, publications cannot solely rely on generating clicks in an environment in which search traffic is declining. For publications just getting off the ground, this risk can be existential; without publishing frequently enough, there won’t be enough traction to build a recognizable brand. This explains the heavy push to get you to subscribe to newsletters.
Most publishers pay particular attention to the first 90 days of a new subscriber, pushing them to sign up to newsletters, podcasts, and personalisation features. They know that regular (daily) usage is the biggest predictor of continued subscription. Subscribers acknowledge this too, pointing out how trial periods allow them to ‘get to know’ a brand.[1]
Interestingly, the one exception to this seems to be blogs (or is at least the case for this one). With no money to pursue, there isn’t the need to build an audience. Many readers may just come for the one piece that is helpful to them, and then never return again. Those that are regular readers are likely subscribed via RSS, and not even counted in the analytics.
Give the people what they want
The last evolution of content is flipping the script; instead of content creators making what fits with their brand, they compete to be the fastest to meet audience demand. YouTube launched a suite of features this week that improves the ability for creators to test different strategies against their audience. Instead of being content creators, some producers may switch to becoming content chasers. One day you are someone that makes funny cat videos, but when content about outer space is trending, you churn out videos about the moon. This is peak low-quality content, when only speed matters and there is no longer a need for a recognizable brand.
Why this matters
I’ll finish with why I think high-quality content matters in the first place, and what we will lose if it trickles away. Many pieces that require a lot of time, effort, or money also rely on trust. Anonymous sources are suspicious unless the author has a long history of honest creation, and the establishment of brands builds this trust. Retractions are also essential when things go wrong, but this only matters if the same readers come back to the publication the next day.
We want diversity in the content that we consume, but I don’t think we want it so diverse that we are all reading/watching/listening to things from sources which we have never interacted with before and never will again. When everyone starts throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks, in pursuit of cashing in on the viral events of the day, that is what ends up happening.
When we read low-quality content from the creators we have subscribed to for a long time, we shouldn’t antagonize them too much. The content ecosystem is a pressure cooker, and there needs to be a balance between maintaining an existing audience and growing that to include people that haven’t heard of the brand yet. It’s okay to simply skip over a story that doesn’t seem worth reading, or to decide that you don’t really want to read the 30-minute in-depth analysis of a bank you have never heard of.
It is okay to not be informed about everything. Support the work that interests you so that longer in-depth pieces about areas you are interested in continue to thrive. There will occasionally be fluff, but it’s just business.
Paying for news: Price-conscious consumers look for value amid cost-of-living crisis. Reuters Institute. DOI: 10.60625/risj-x0rq-6c43 ↩︎