Paraphrased: Content is still king. The content consumption landscape has just evolved. It always has. There was a day when a cat video thrived on MySpace. Now that video thrives on TikTok.
Love this post. I feel like this has been true for a couple of years but people kept investing due to inertia. The picture is more clear now.
The place I get stuck when thinking about what's next, is that a company still needs to build an owned audience. Sponsoring creators can be part of a strategy, but can't be the whole strategy. And you can't hire the best content creators (they are better off being independent).
Given that, how do companies still build and engage an owned audience in this new era?
Elena, happy to have found you, appreciate the post and I will gently point out that economy which is in one of your headlines is spelled with two Cs. Was that intentional?
The first blog I ever had in 2005 was on Blogger.com and they built a professional site with WordPress, which now sits defunct as I decide whether to go full throttle with Substack.
And there is a choice to be made in the Substack settings that affects discoverability, so it was said in a note about five months ago that is now no longer there. To opt out of being trained on for purposes of AI training on your content could affect discoverability, but that language seems to have disappeared, and the choice is to simply out or stay opted in.
I would check out an organization called Credtent.org Who’s independent creator registry allows for their technology to monitor if AI is training on your content and notifying companies that you might be a do not train or license me first Creator.
It doesn’t seem fair to want to make a Living as a creator only than to have some for more of the monetary value—Siphoned off by AI LLMs.
Content theft needs to stop.
Licensing needs to begin.
Another individual making great efforts in the space is Ed Rex – Newton, who is TEDTalk from October 2024 is an illuminating listen!
Thanks for the great content and advice complete with supporting data points.
Thank you so much for pointing out the 'ecconomy' typo - it is fixed. Its quite fascinating - read and re-read this article 10 times and still missed it.
And agree with the rest... its a muddy world out there.
This post is so timely. Our content team inherited a blog through an acquisition that was strategically driven by the Product team. They are constantly pushing lots of self-aggrandizing posts about the dot(who cares?) releases, and they still want to do that to this day. We have made similar arguments to this post. We see where the puck is going, but we're in a staring contest with this team that is living in 2016. The data here makes this post super powerful and we'll use it to continue building our business case. Thank you!
It cements a hunch I've had for the past few months — that insightful, value-packed newsletters and YouTube channels for niche audiences are the way forward.
Part of the challenge now is that LLMs have taken a significant share of organic search traffic. Before the AI search era, search intents that once drove clicks—like clarifying issues or discovering product features—led users to blog posts. As more users shift to these tools and AI overview traditional blogs are seeing a decline in organic traffic. The biggest example of this is Stack overflow
Thanks for this post! How do YOU manage such a broad and prolific content strategy? Who are some of your key hires/teammates that help you deliver each week?
haha - I'm a nearly a solo enterprise here (I do have an awesome editor to help me). I generally write about what I find interesting and that's about it. I don't have content strategy. I run one week at a time.
Love this post Elena. Amazing shifts well underway.
Paraphrased: Content is still king. The content consumption landscape has just evolved. It always has. There was a day when a cat video thrived on MySpace. Now that video thrives on TikTok.
Love this post. I feel like this has been true for a couple of years but people kept investing due to inertia. The picture is more clear now.
The place I get stuck when thinking about what's next, is that a company still needs to build an owned audience. Sponsoring creators can be part of a strategy, but can't be the whole strategy. And you can't hire the best content creators (they are better off being independent).
Given that, how do companies still build and engage an owned audience in this new era?
Elena, happy to have found you, appreciate the post and I will gently point out that economy which is in one of your headlines is spelled with two Cs. Was that intentional?
The first blog I ever had in 2005 was on Blogger.com and they built a professional site with WordPress, which now sits defunct as I decide whether to go full throttle with Substack.
And there is a choice to be made in the Substack settings that affects discoverability, so it was said in a note about five months ago that is now no longer there. To opt out of being trained on for purposes of AI training on your content could affect discoverability, but that language seems to have disappeared, and the choice is to simply out or stay opted in.
I would check out an organization called Credtent.org Who’s independent creator registry allows for their technology to monitor if AI is training on your content and notifying companies that you might be a do not train or license me first Creator.
It doesn’t seem fair to want to make a Living as a creator only than to have some for more of the monetary value—Siphoned off by AI LLMs.
Content theft needs to stop.
Licensing needs to begin.
Another individual making great efforts in the space is Ed Rex – Newton, who is TEDTalk from October 2024 is an illuminating listen!
Thanks for the great content and advice complete with supporting data points.
Thank you so much for pointing out the 'ecconomy' typo - it is fixed. Its quite fascinating - read and re-read this article 10 times and still missed it.
And agree with the rest... its a muddy world out there.
Miro has more traffic than Intercom and Gong combined at 50K visits/month, but it IS not really growing.
My ESP client who is in the biz of building websites for lead generation enjoyed reading this with me today. :) How can I DM you? If I may?
This post is so timely. Our content team inherited a blog through an acquisition that was strategically driven by the Product team. They are constantly pushing lots of self-aggrandizing posts about the dot(who cares?) releases, and they still want to do that to this day. We have made similar arguments to this post. We see where the puck is going, but we're in a staring contest with this team that is living in 2016. The data here makes this post super powerful and we'll use it to continue building our business case. Thank you!
Solid post, Elena! Thank you for writing it.
It cements a hunch I've had for the past few months — that insightful, value-packed newsletters and YouTube channels for niche audiences are the way forward.
Part of the challenge now is that LLMs have taken a significant share of organic search traffic. Before the AI search era, search intents that once drove clicks—like clarifying issues or discovering product features—led users to blog posts. As more users shift to these tools and AI overview traditional blogs are seeing a decline in organic traffic. The biggest example of this is Stack overflow
Thanks for this post! How do YOU manage such a broad and prolific content strategy? Who are some of your key hires/teammates that help you deliver each week?
haha - I'm a nearly a solo enterprise here (I do have an awesome editor to help me). I generally write about what I find interesting and that's about it. I don't have content strategy. I run one week at a time.
That old influencer marketing channel is as powerful as ever.
Very insightful. remind me to avoid wasting time in AI generate SEO