Creator ick-onomy
What’s the point of content?
Every ten days or so, I look at the infinite YouTube feed and feel physically nauseous.
It’s scary to see all these brilliant minds (and I do think they’re brilliant) shrinking themselves into a single title + thumbnail combination in order to win views. We call it “packaging” in the YouTube world. I call it flattening.
I really don’t know how people stick it out in content. I’m ten months in and I’m already internally screaming crying throwing up.
Let me back up.
A day in the creator economy looks like this: browse YouTube, clock the numbers appended to every title and username. Outlier score. Views per hour. Subscriber count. My eyes dart around the screen looking for bangers from our peers, anything that catches my eye.
Then comes a lot of screenshotting and copy-pasting. Thumbnails that stand out go onto a Figma file, titles go onto a Notion database, view counts go into a little formula calculator.
The YouTube algorithm is good. Like, real freaking good. It knows what channels I’m clicking on and watching, so it pulls up similar videos. Only now they’ve become too familiar. I’ll see three of the exact same title within a few thumb swipes.
(Perhaps more horribly, I’ve found myself in the hustle bro corner of YouTube, where every other video has “F*ck it I’ll tell you everything” and “Thank me later” in the thumbnail. iykyk.)
Instagram is the same. Creators converging into identical hooks, identical cover photos, identical reels.
Social media platforms have become a monolith of echo chambers. The full gamut of human creativity, flattened by 0s and 1s.
Maybe it’s because I’m spending 40+ hours a week on the internet. I’m only ten months into doing this full-time, and the optimisation, the hooking and rehooking, the retention-hackiness and algo-maxxing already leaves me feeling sick.
The creator economy. More like the creator ick-onomy.
But having been on this side of content, I get it.
It’s hard to buck the trend when bucking the trend doesn’t get rewarded.
We tried. We put out videos we thought were actually useful. They just won’t get as many views as “If you’re ambitious but lazy, watch this”1.
And then there’s the pace, which is ridiculous.
Top creators who run businesses on the back of their YouTube channels are uploading once a week while re-recording snippets into short-form content that gets uploaded onto different platforms.
That’s 52 pieces of advice from one creator a year. And I’d bet that many viewers watch videos from more than one creator. So people are watching like 3-4 pieces of highly-produced advice a week?
Wouldn’t everyone just be better off taking one piece of advice and executing the hell out of that piece of advice? Like to actually adhere to one habit that would change the trajectory of their lives. To actually sit with an idea long enough for it to move something within you and change your behaviour.
I just don’t know if the best use of people’s time is to create something that gets uploaded onto a server and into a void, and to have to do it again and again and again at a dizzying pace.
Wait hang on. I think there’s a word for sitting with an idea. I think it was invented a long time ago.
I think it’s called a book.
Maybe the problem is that we don’t treat content with the same reverence as we treat books and quality, stress-tested writing. And maybe that’s the fault of the consumer, because it costs us so little effort to watch a highly-produced, amazingly-animated 17-minute video, so we don’t value the contents just as much as we value 80,000 words from a well-researched book that will take us 2 weeks to read.
Ali asks me this question once a week, usually while we are hashing out the contents of a video: “Becky, what’s the point of content?”
The honest answer is I don’t know. That I feel grossed out by it a lot too. That he probably feels 10x what I’m feeling because he’s been at it for longer and he’s been immersed in it deeper and his ideas have been tried and tested for strain more than the average creator.
But I tell him what I also believe is true: that his advice can help someone. That although he’s said the same thing multiple times in the past, there will be someone who hears his advice at the time they are ready to act on it, and this will make a difference. That creators get bored of their content a lot faster than the audience will be. That people will need to hear the same advice again, and again, and again, before it finally clicks in their head.
And yet.
We have never known leverage of this scale, of being able to speak to a black circle and have your face and voice and vibe resonate with people you’ll never meet. That by doing something once, you would have created a documented, replayable recording that can outlast you.
So while I fault the creator economy, I can’t fault creators or consumers. It feels as if we have all collectively fallen into this hamster wheel. More eyeballs. More screentime. More content.
I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure anyone does.
But we’re still here, trying to figure it out.
Update log:
📹 Posted my February creative updates: book, YT producing, SCBW, back on YouTube
✊ Admiring Scott Galloway’s Resist and Unsubscribe movement to encourage people to show their stance by cancelling their subscriptions. Economic shock hits harder than a Saturday full-day march.
📺 This The Studio video - A Year in The Life at MKBHD. - is pure cinema
🤓 Hosted my first content clinic (aka content office hours) for students in our Lifestyle Business Academy
🌎 Launched the February publish challenge alongside Bhav Sharma. It’s a small WhatsApp group to keep each other accountable to publishing goals for the shortest month of the year. Comment below if you wanna join!
🧊 Fridge broke down on Monday morning 🥲 but got someone to fix it today. Gosh that was one way to start the week!
Work with me: https://go.beckyisj.com/workwithme
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I know this is currently lower, but it also was just published, so just you wait 😂
You can opt out. But you won’t be as successful.
Book named this when? 👀