There’s something rather unsettling about the modern man’s desire to consume content. All around the world millions of people reach out to the internet, home of most of everything that humanity has ever made, and checks to see if it has made some more of it. It’s produce or die for anyone out there. And unsurprisingly, most people are picking out the former.
It’s one of the most common complaints we see around. A veritable glut of content provided by us through the internet by staff writers, corporate faces depicted in glorious vertical video, and really anyone with access to a phone, keyboard, or camera. And we just can’t get enough of it. Look at you reading this. Look at me writing it. And Sturgeon’s law guarantees that most of it is absolute crap. As cheap and disposable as candy and with about as much nutritional value. Not that one can’t have candy once in a while, but modern algorithms and engagement metrics demand it all as the cornerstone of most content strategies.
We’ve been here before, naturally, back when traditional media was the only media and the 24-hour news channel was a novel thing. The concept was sound but there were only two options for content. Either just repeat the same news item over and over again…or try to get as much juice out of it as you possibly can. The former didn’t quite get enough engagement after a while so they moved towards the latter.
And so it was that a 30-minute summation of news gave way to the news item, then some panelists talking in detail about the news item before going into a panel of talking heads to discuss how the news item will develop based on other as-of-yet nonexistent news items, repeat until next insignificant tidbit of information to make the next six hours of television.
As the internet became the predominant location for content consumption, the same bad habits decided to creep into website content strategies. After all, more eyeballs equals more ad revenue which equals…success(?).
Clearly the strategy is effective, ask BuzzFeed, whose absolute garbage-tier content is beloved by the sort of people that don’t turn on their adblocker, or indeed know there’s such a thing. More engaged people justified these wastes of bandwidth saying that they were necessary to fund their excellent journalism arm, BuzzFeed news. Of course, when the money stopped rolling in quite the amounts that they wanted and it was layoff time, it was this most-worthy part of BuzzFeed that got shut down first. Sister website HuffPost, much more willing to play the pop news game, remains unaffected. One can hope that the people from BuzzFeed news that will make the transition to HuffPo will be allowed to continue publishing excellent but less profitable news items.
Treading water as an idiom is used to describe a situation where you lack progress, continuing to do something over and over until change comes around. This is how content strategies feel nowadays. With people forced to create something, anything, to stave off the horror of a stagnant front page. God forbid it’s only updated when something worthwhile comes along.
