I think content is a bad business
swizec.com
swizec.com
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.
If they first got a job, in the U.S probably, and kept one for that long, which is hardly a given these days.
In no other market is ip and advertising worth much.
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.
It's an unrelated aside, but the layoffs have no relation to technical fundamentals. They are purely economic events.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.)
> 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.
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.
> My pulling back started in ~2023
this sounds like significantly reducing the amount of work.
Okay, this could also be read as a complaint that the revenue is not enough for profit with any scaling down.
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.
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.
More likely you'll reach some percentage of your target market in your first month while some other percentage still won't have heard of you or won't have the interest/money/time (depending what you sell) at that exact moment (and for them it's the opposite - better to wait until they expect to use it than buy early). In a year there might be a significant new group to sell to (say you're selling intro to python material and now you've got a new years worth of people to sell to).
None of that really matters if nobody buys your content after 6 months. You get those initial ones and you're done. It's a tough environment to build a business in because you can't just flick a switch that says "anyone who can possibly want to buy my stuff will do so this week", you have to battle to get as many as you can before it dies out and you need the new thing (or at least an updated thing).
In your examples, you open up new markets, and doing that changes the other side of the equation: you need more work to get that extra income later.
In the end, that example changes all three: the amount of work, the amount of reward, and the time distribution, so I don't think it really shows that inertia is so common.
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.
Having to work too much for not enough return is what makes the business bad.
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?
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
At least with startups you can get lucky.
Writing (or producing) something memorable requires something more.
They don't need to fight "AI" and prevent it, they only need to make sure their work isn't stolen at individual level, and there are tons of options they can adapt.
Not exclusively, no. As we march forward I'd expect:
- the number of web pages generated by AI will outpace the number generated by humans, probably on the order of a few magnitudes, meaning that human-generated content will drown in a sea of machine generated content. Furthermore, ad-supported web sites will all be AI generated, cutting off advertising funding for human-generated sites
- this will make web pages a very poor source of information to scrape overall, since it'll mostly be LLM output
- sophisticated AI builders will start signing licensing deals with content creators that gives them exclusive access for their AI. Think: Medical and legal journals, large archives of historical works, stock market historical data, technical manuals, etc. This content isn't very consumer friendly as-is, but could be used to generate consumer friendly content that is technically more accurate.
> It's weird how you paint that it's inevitable, just to tell them "tough luck"? They don't need to fight "AI" they only need to make sure their work isn't stolen, and there are many options they can adapt to.
I think you're suggesting that people can continue publishing their content on publicly accessible web sites and that they're somehow able to detect that their site is being visited by an AI web scraper, and in those cases they feed "garbage" to the scraper. I'm suggesting that this will be a loosing battle, that trying to detect bots already is a forever-war that can't be won, while at the same time consumer behavior will change such that publishing pages on public web sites won't be an effective way to reach an audience because of the mountains of AI-generated content.
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.
LLM will need to consume official documents but there won't be much on "I got this exception..." content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't help but notice that this piece was also a form of edutainment.
I wish they taught the basics of how the world works in school.