Content marketing is dead. I got an email this week that PROVES it. Look!
The race to the bottom is unwinnable, but plenty of providers are trying to do so anyway.
This email reminds me of the moment that I knew crypto was over. Months before conventional wisdom pronounced crypto dead, I was waiting in line at a store. A man in a cheap suit approached me. He had a goon in a tracksuit looming behind him. “Have you ever heard of Bitcoin?” he asked. He had a glossy printed postcard with a QR code on it that he’d be more than happy to give me. I laughed. But I also knew. It was a symptom of rot from within. And it was fatal. Death was coming to the surface. It was already there.
That’s what this email shows me. Rot. Irreversible decay. Necrosis. I can be grosser and more morbid about it and still not fully capture what I smell.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be people out there doing something fantastic with words to help get commercial ideas across. It will just be something else. We might be better off calling it something else. Sort of like the way everything interesting about crypto became about tokenization while the rest SBF’ed itself into putrescence.
As for “content marketing,” this outcome may be positive for everyone anyway, better for the attentional ecosystem at least. Not so much for industry “livestock” — yeah, that is how they will be treated — fated to live their short writing lives in content factory farms. It’s an extremely sad prospect.
Brooklin Nash 💡 and Jennifer Goforth Gregory – you both posted some very insightful posts this week on rates, transparency, and writer abuse. Would love to hear your take on this one! As well as thoughts from all my other smart and decent writer/creator connections.
