I think content is a bad business

https://swizec.com/blog/it-made-me-500k-but-i-think-content-is-a-bad-business/

by Tomte • 2 years ago

96 59 2 years ago

My pulling back started in ~2023 after 8 years of thinking, 24/7, "what's the next thing I'm gonna write about?". I was tired and the biz wasn't sparking joy like it once used to. Burnout is grind with no reward.
The business stopped being profitable almost immediately. That's the strongest sign I have that this is a bad business. It's more like owning a job than running a business.

Did I get that right? Having to work to earn money makes a business bad?

And I thought extracting money without creating value was the bad thing to do.

eddyzh• 2 years ago

I think you confirm his distinction between having a job and owning a business (implicitly of the type) that might Create recurring income.

lazide• 2 years ago

The idea with most businesses is that you invest in creating the machine, so eventually it doesn’t require 100% of your attention to get paid every day. Either because you hired and trained someone to do parts of it, or automated parts of it, or invested enough capital that it doesn’t require as much ‘sweat’ every day.

Something that requires you show up and do the same work every day to make the same money is generally referred to as ‘a job’. In this case, one with no real job security or safety net either.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

Admittedly, $500k revenue over almost ten years with a “small team” probably isn’t something to get too excited about.

persnickety5• 2 years ago

I'd have kept my keyboard shut if the implication presented was "work and little revenue is bad business", but here I'm seeing "no work and no profit is bad business".

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

It's his side hustle, not his only form of income. With that context, it's way more impressive.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

A sound business should have solid inertia to still create value to people for quite a while when an individual takes a short break from putting in 100% (voluntarily or not). A business which immediately become unprofitable the second you stop working is, like the author describes, acting more like a contract job than a healthy business (especially if it's only at 500k of revenue in that time with a small team of people - not much buffer to be made out of that revenue regardless of the margin).

Usually the main goal is to create value doing something you like to do. Of course there are far more than one bad or one good thing to do with a business so that doesn't exclude other things from being on either side of the scale.

persnickety5• 2 years ago

Does inertia matter? Or is it just another way of saying that the revenue is low?

I'd rather have X in my pocket instantly after creating the value rather than have half instantly and get the rest as an inertial trickle over the next year.

elzbardico• 2 years ago

500k in 8 years for a software engineer is not that much money. Unless you live in a LCOL location, you'd probably would have to juggle between a day job and your side hustle.

Most people would think, ok, but once the content is ready, it'd pay itself. But things are not that easy. You have to answer questions, need to update your content for it to continue attracting customers.

There comes a time when you're fucking tired, and you put down every hour you worked on your content vs how much you got, and you find out that you're making 2x, 3x dollars an hour in your day job than you're making on hustle hours.

But not only that, those hours have a higher marginal cost for you, any additional hour after a full work day is increasingly more painful.

Vegenoid• 2 years ago

Did I get that right? Having to work to earn money makes a business bad?

Having to work too much for not enough return is what makes the business bad.

vidarh• 2 years ago

"Bad" in the sense that it's not a business that is much different from being in a job.

It is reasonable for someone to think that a business isn't a good business if it relies so much on any single person that the revenue craters the moment one person is pulling away.

It's at the very least not a solid business, and it is a high-risk one. What if you get sick?

jlund-molfese• 2 years ago

The author makes this distinction between a "business" and a "job", but it'd be more accurate to call it the difference between "rent-seeking" and "production" imo.

Putting aside investing and landlordism, the vast majority of new businesses require decades of work to get to the point where you just make money without doing any work, if they ever do. Just ask any small business owner—if it was that foolproof and easy, everyone would do it.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

They wrote

It's more like owning a job than running a business

And I like that analogy for its illustrative purposes

As the business couldnt be sold or the key person couldnt be replaced economically, or at all [1] for it to become passive

I think all of those businesses you used as an example are also bad businesses, akin to owning a job

[1] If I was that person I would probably attempt fine tuning a language model on my writing style and churning out more since the brand name is the valuable part, or at least consider it

jeeva• 2 years ago

I feel like that ChainsawMassacre channel on YouTube is an example of what happens when The Brand attempts to lengthen their content.

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

its ok to be confused. things will fall into place eventually.

yawnxyz• 2 years ago

Digital products I feel are becoming more and more "content" nowadays.

Lots of previously "durable" products because there was some kind of technical or ability moat is gone, so everyone releasing software is always racing against each other.

I think this reality is hitting freelancers, agencies, and all the way past funded startups to large SaaS companies. That's why layoffs are hitting across the board.

If this person was "wildly profitable in most years" and made a around $500k over 9 years — that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises. And they wouldn't have to hire a team, pay corp taxes before paying themselves, etc.

I think every kind of work and job is now getting reduced to the content grind treadmill — including for the large companies. That's the final form of business and work.

brailsafe• 2 years ago

that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises. And they wouldn't have to hire a team, pay corp taxes before paying themselves, etc.

If they first got a job, in the U.S probably, and kept one for that long, which is hardly a given these days.

tightbookkeeper• 2 years ago

if you take this analysis one step further, it doesn't make sense for the whole world to sustain itself selling entertainment and hobby products to upper middle class Americans.

In no other market is ip and advertising worth much.

mattgreenrocks4• 2 years ago

Also correlates with the rise in people believing that brand -building is just as important as actual skills. As in, the only way to stand out is to be Someone.

It’s ultimately a pick me scenario, and still fundamentally submissive.

namaria3• 2 years ago

It’s ultimately a pick me scenario, and still fundamentally submissive.

To add to that, it's very easy for platforms to game the system by actually picking winners and then having tonnes of wannabes trying to 'make it'. It's cruel really.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

That's why layoffs are hitting across the board.

It's an unrelated aside, but the layoffs have no relation to technical fundamentals. They are purely economic events.

nickjj• 2 years ago

that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises

You have to factor in how much time you spend on the content for it to be comparable. A normal tech US salary job would be 9am to 6pm and maybe 15-30 days of PTO a year.

If you have a course or book that made $500,000 over 9 years, you might have spent 4-5 months making it up front and then XX hours per year for support and keeping it up to date. The return doesn't sound bad if you spent 40 hours a year on it. That's 320 hours over 8 years or roughly 2 months of full time work.

blindriver• 2 years ago

All content will be consumed by AI and regurgitated by them, and content creators won’t get anything from it. Content creation is a complete waste of time at this point unless AI companies are prevented from consuming content for free, and regurgitating the answers.

hecate5• 2 years ago

Is it really that hard to make utility of a crawler visit to ones page negative? Hidden links with boatloads of garbage, generated nonsense and so on ... Seems like the only viable method how to fight back to me.

jt21902• 2 years ago

That won’t matter because AI changes the market from a “speculative, broad-appeal” content model to an “on-demand individually tailored” one. Consumers will stop searching for something sorta like they wanted and start asking for exactly what they want. Pushing static content onto a web site won’t be able to compete most of the time.

techjamie• 2 years ago

Maybe a link that effectively works as a crawler trap, where it links to a bunch of Markov chain garbage, and the Markov chains just keep linking to more that are randomly generated.

Markov chains are almost free compared to LLM generation, and the content, from a machine point of view, couldn't simply be ruled out as non-human unless you had a smaller model in the background pruning out that sort of thing.

keiferski• 2 years ago

Distribution is a part of the business. A question-answer based AI is an inferior distribution method to a human-written email that gets sent to my inbox once a week.

fma• 2 years ago

I also wonder who is going to post on stack overflow if questions can be answered by an LLM. At some point new consumable content drops like a cliff?

LLM will need to consume official documents but there won't be much on "I got this exception..." content.

tempodox3• 2 years ago

Which raises the question what would be the point of LLMs when the majority of their training data is just the fluff generated by other LLMs. When the output of an LLM becomes indistinguishable from its input, why go to the trouble of training it at all?

spwa4• 2 years ago

The obvious answer is to do more with it. This will actually be a positive as soon as science is done by AI. As soon as the economy is done by AI. As soon as wars are fought by AI.

nuancebydefault• 2 years ago

I don't believe that LLM's cannot be made such that they distinguish AI from non-AI content. On the contrary. There are ways to compare similarly looking content and digging up the one that provides most insights, new ideas or actually measured data. There are ways to find out how 'old' the content is by keeping track of when it is updated and in what way (the actual data or just meta data about it, or just their interpretation or presentation).

The crawlers/bots spend time and energy and hence will be optimized to not just blindly eat rehashed content. Unlike currently google's search engine. The latter feeds on the revenues of the rehashed/ad'ified content.

Narciss• 2 years ago

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

alexashka• 2 years ago

Anything that relies on human input for output is a bad business (in the presence of viable alternatives).

I wish they taught the basics of how the world works in school.

adamgordonbell• 2 years ago

if you're doing it for money or

fame,

don't do it.

if you're doing it because you want

women in your bed,

don't do it.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,

don't do it.

Charles Bukowski

davidmurdoch• 2 years ago

Sounds nice, but most of us would just lay in bed all day sulking if we subscribed to this.

appplication• 2 years ago

I’m not sure if you’ve read much Bukowski, but that’s certainly a lens through which he has seen the world.

bpm140• 2 years ago

This is the same thing I tell entrepreneurs.

At least with startups you can get lucky.

Writing (or producing) something memorable requires something more.

herbertl• 2 years ago

Edutainment and ads dominate the market

Can't help but notice that this piece was also a form of edutainment.

tempodox3• 2 years ago

Most people consuming this beginner content should turn off youtube, think of a project, and go write some code.

In theory. In practice, they will stay on YT and then use an LLM to crank out some code. I suspect the ways newbies learn to code are about to change, and there will be no going back.

And it looks like the author agrees:

ChatGPT and friends can answer all newbie questions customized to the problem at hand. The future is in hard-earned deep insights that are hard to fake or buy.

mattgreenrocks4• 2 years ago

Which reinforces the cycle of needing to keep up with influencer videos. As the kids say, it’s a cope.

from-nibly• 2 years ago

Yeah that's the next bubble but it's not the next effective way to do things. I think there is going to be a bubble and a crash with this.

tempodox3• 2 years ago

The hype will not sustain its current intensity, that's for sure, but even so, some of the LLM usage patterns will stick. I'd consider anything outside of entertainment too risky, but that's just my opinion.

whateveracct• 2 years ago

that's false progress though

namaria3• 2 years ago

LLMs don't really teach you. They give you masticated and off-base talking points that make you feel like you understand something. Worst case scenario they do the work for you and you have a crutch.

There will be a lot of 'coders' unable spot the bugs in their AI slop and incapable of deviating from the deep ruts of the most common code bases LLMs get trained on.

ankleturtle• 2 years ago

The launch is an intense marketing push with a component of artificial scarcity.

I consider artificial scarcity to be an unethical practice. It's literally lying. It uses fake timers to pressure people into buying or fake limits to suggest that they need to buy now. Does it work? Absolutely. Is it ethical? Not a chance.

mashlol• 2 years ago

Do you find retail store sales to be unethical too?

em-bee• 2 years ago

retail stores have inventory and limited space to store it. they do need to get rid of old inventory before they can store new products. because of long timespans from production to delivery, they need to anticipate demand, and sometimes they get that wrong and they don't sell their current inventory before the new stuff arrives. then they can either try to sell more through sales, or rent extra storage.

eszed• 2 years ago

Most of them? Yes.

The situation where "hey, we've got too much of [this] because [whatever reason], so we'll mark it down in order to sell it" is how a Free Market is 'supposed to work': prices operating as a signaling mechanism, by which everyone receives all of the (relevant) information.

Price-manipulation strategies juice sales by exploiting buyers' psychological reward mechanisms. Defenders of current practice will say it's OK because willing-buyer-willing-seller - which is certainly true - but everything about those techniques injects noise into the price-signals that make market economies efficient goods-distribution systems.

I'm kind of a free-market fundamentalist, and think any marketing beyond informational marginally contributes to market failure.

Yes, I know nearly everyone on this board makes their money downstream from manipulative marketing practices, so it's easier to close our eyes to the consequences. (I'm not playing the purity card, by the way: my company does very little marketing, but it manipulates other psychological reward systems in equally destructive-to-humanity ways.) We're all complicit in building the systems we (should) deplore.

seafoamteal• 2 years ago

PS: like I said in early 2023, The programming tutorial SEO industry is dead. ChatGPT and friends can answer all newbie questions customized to the problem at hand. The future is in hard-earned deep insights that are hard to fake or buy.

Well, sure, there's no point in writing yet another Next.js starter tutorial. There never was after the first three, but when new technology comes out, someone is going to have to explore it and write about it if you want an LLM to be trained to do the same. Someone correct me if I've gotten that wrong.

mattgreenrocks4• 2 years ago

Though given Next.js’s history, maybe people would pay for a guaranteed up-to-date tutorial. :)

neilv• 2 years ago

But you're only as good as your last hit. You can never stop. The business will milk until there's no more milk to give. Even if it's your own business.

Fits my intuition. I'm about to launch niche "content" site, as an indie side project, and this reality has been at the back of my mind.

For content planning, I have a funnel with a dozen topics in it, and maybe I'll think of a dozen more.

But after that, it's only half a machine: an audience, a formula, some bureaucratic&infrastructure stuff, a little bespoke tech, and a trailing period of recurring revenue from some partnerships.

The half that's not a machine scales only linearly with skilled human effort: a combination of quality content developing, partnership courting, and guerilla marketing.

There's a way to throw LLM methods and some nontrivial code at scaling the content, but the LLM component to the quality will be awful. So the resulting LLM-involved content would be no better than the existing SEO sewage farms that are already polluting Google hits.

One of the reasons I'm not branding it with my personal name is that, once I've handmade the 1-2 dozen content topics that I can do fairly easily, and the monthly recurring revenue (guessing) trends flat and eventually down, I'm thinking I might be willing to sell the business. To grow it, the buyer would have to throw in other humans, to continue to make quality content. (Though, throwing in the humans, to mesh with the gears of the machine, isn't the right imagery.)

(Or, there's a potential pivot to a VC-backed type of company, loosely based on related know-how that's not obvious from the modest, kitchen-table indie content. But I think that pivot involves either B2B enterprise sales to brands doing direct-to-consumer sales, or a different PoC and then acquisition by one of a few massive online retailers. (Google would have the resources to do something related, as a third party to the brands and retailers, with necessarily more of an AI spin, but I guess the first person there to whom you pitched the idea would probably run with it, in-house, since they're no longer acquihiring everyone.) None of those business options I'd attempt without a lot of funding and complementary skillset firepower. Also, none of the possibly very lucrative options I see is a content business.)

I think content is a bad business

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