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  "description": "Judging a book by its cover is a great idea. Until content makes a comeback.",
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  "publishedAt": "2023-03-15T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "The age of content being king is long behind us.\nPackaging has replaced it in almost all media.\n\nIn the early days of content creation—1500s, not 2000s—content was scarce.\nThe printing press was invented, but people did not have access to content the way we did in the 1900s.\n\nFrom the late 1800s to early 1900s the world went from books as the main source of content to radio (live), recorded audio, movies, and television.\nThe explosion of content and formats changed peoples consumption habits forever.\nNo longer were you consuming what was available, there was too much to consume in a lifetime and you had to make a decision.\n\nJudging a book by its cover was the right thing to do.\nYou could not consume everything so you had to choose what you would invest your time in.\nPackaging dethroned content as king.\n\nThe first movie poster was made in 1895; the first movie trailer in 1913.\nAdvertising and billboards would raise awareness, but they needed more efficient ways of helping consumers decide if they wanted to consume the content.\n\nBooks, magazines, newspapers, and any content looking for your attention—and money—had to play along.\nSensational titles, enticing images, provocative summaries are not new to YouTube.\nAdvertisers and creators have been perfecting the craft in every new format for more than 100 years.\n\n!a movie poster of people in a theater watching a movie\nThe first movie poster for L'Arrosour Arrosé.\n\nThe Internet\n\nThe Internet had its own shift to packaging.\nIn the early years (pre-2000) bandwidth was limited and images were scarce.\n\nAs bandwidth increased so did the packaging.\nLists of underlined blue text shifted to images.\nAnimations and videos started to emerge and website designers—using that term very loosly—used every feature HTML and JavaScript provided to draw attention.\n\n!screenshot of YouTube in 2005\nYouTube homepage (2005) via webdesignmuseum.org\n\nIf a human has to make a decision to spend their time on the content you created they first need to be convinced it's something worth their time.\nBut people value their time in differently.\nVideo content focused towards kids and teenagers tends to have great viewing times because they don't value their time as much as a busy adult.\n\nContent trying to reach a busy audience requires packaging that tailors to their needs.\nWord of mouth doesn't have the same reach anymore because there are too many words and mouths.\nTrust carries a lot of weight.\n\nIf you're making content today and not putting effort into packaging then you are doing your audience a disservice.\nIn the world of SEO optimizations, hashtags, and social media—your content will fail to convince anyone it's worth the time to click.\nYou can't reach an audience who isn't reaching back.\n\n!a screenshot of google search for best ice cream in Los Angeles\n\nAs a consumer, what is the best content for you requires you to make a decision.\nBut the decision you've made is entirely a decision based on the packaging, not content.\nYou've judged links by their titles, videos by their thumbnails, and books by their covers because you have to.\n\nStandards like The Open Graph Protocol are designed to make content more appealing.\nA list of unformatted link titles have no chance in the world of AI generated banner images and descriptions.\n\nWhere content is (still) king\n\nBut content is making a comeback.\nSearch and recommendation engines can present you with packaged content, but rarely do they make the decision for you.\n\nWhen was the last time you clicked \"I'm feeling lucky\" and actually expected the best answer?\nWhen did you let the next YouTube video play without looking at your options?\n\nThe answer for most busy adults is almost never.\nThe only times we don't make a decision is when we don't have the option.\n\nAlgorithmic social feeds have removed the decision making process.\nFacebook and Twitter have tried to convince us it's better, but in the world of limited social graphs—your friends—choice matters.\n\nTaking who you know and showing their best content isn't what we want.\nShowing us the best content based on what we like—or in some way indicated we like—is where content shines.\n\nTikTok is an interest based social network with seemingly endless content.\nThe only thing you have to decide is how long you want to watch.\nScroll and it's gone.\nImmediately replaced with the next video you didn't decide to watch.\nEngage and more like it will come.\n\nAlgorithmic feeds switch the click.\nYou don't click after you decide what to watch.\nYou scroll because you're done watching.\n\nWatch time is still the primary metric that matters.\nEngagement matters, but the platforms live and die based on minutes watched because that's what revenue is tied to.\n\nWhere are we going?\n\nThe real explosion of content hasn't begun.\nSEO content farms that used to abuse search terms, hashtags, and post frequency were just the begining of the spam.\nThe current implementation of internet search won't survive the next wave of content.\n\nAI generated content is just starting to hit some platforms and the open web.\nThe next 3-5 years are going to see and explosion of written content, then images, then music, then videos.\nThis won't look like the obviously spam content of the early 2000s.\n\nExcessive amounts of compute power will be used to create more, faster.\nSay goodbye to any service that offers a free tier.\nThere's no avoiding the mass of storage growth that's about to happen.\n\nEvery day there is more than 82 years of video uploaded to YouTube.\nThe amount of content that will be uploaded per day of AI generated content will make YouTube's current business model uneconomical without major changes.\n\nThe only way to fight the AI is going to be with AI.\nPeople looking for content won't be able to make decisions because packaging and recommendations will fail.\nMaking decisions won't scale because there'll be too many options.\n\nI'm hopeful that the next generation of consumers will reverse the trend.\nThe cycle will reset and the race to create the perfectly packaged peice of content will be avoided.\n\nConsumers will seek the imperfectness of human creation.\nThe unpackaged \"Me at the zoo\" moments that make content fun.\n\nNot doing it for the likes, but just to share a raw moment of life.",
  "title": "Content was king"
}