The content tide is high and we’re sinking
Creating content is hard, staying afloat is even harder, writes Edge’s Jessica Silver.
Forbes magazine has confirmed a massive boom in content marketing, with marketers increasing their spending and businesses increasing their demands. Within the span of 60 seconds there are 3.8 million Google searches, 3.3 million Facebook posts and 149,500 emails sent. What does this mean for content marketers? We are drowning in content quicksand – just as our feet touch the ground, the refresh button sends us 10 feet deeper into digital Narnia, a.k.a. irrelevance.
Despite the scrolling marathons our thumbs and eyeballs embark upon, our human attention is capped. After all, one can only endure so much Honey Badger spam. According to Mark Schaefer, this ‘Content Shock’ has us living in a marketing epoch where increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.
Audiences are inundated with content, while marketers are slowly losing attention. It’s this imbalance that has turned content marketing into a battlefield. The struggle is real.
I genuinely found this article interesting, then found myself scrolling to the end for a takeaway.
Good ideas and advice –well written
Very interesting article, very true!
Very good article and advice. The Internetification of all things has meant that everyone has access to “the best” (whatever that means) content. Local content thus becomes just another grain in a billion. Sadly, the likes of Graham Kennedy or Molly Meldrum could probably never arise locally again. If it can be digitised then it has to compete with mega content (usually from America). (If it is good enough, then it can be all the more easily stolen by the big players as well) First to go was audio content via Napster (remember them?), now it is everything (books, news, art/images, games, technology). It is a very good point of yours that it has reverted back to the traditional payer model. This was always the dominant model when the big gatekeepers (radio, TV, movies, media, record companies) held control. Then “viral” looked like it would steal the crown. However, as you point out, if you want your content in front of eyes, then you need to pay. Mega saturation has caused this. There are now new (saturation) gatekeepers (crapbook, google, twitter, spotify, youtube etc etc) who control eyes (or ears in the case of music). So it is now back to the way it always was: “viral” has been effectively cured.
Brilliant so well written.
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