Why Great Content Isn't Enough to Build a Sustainable Business

It's never been easier to create content—and never harder to build a sustainable business around it.

Today, almost anybody can launch a podcast, publish a newsletter, start a YouTube channel, or build a website. You don't need a large staff or a lot of money. You don't even need much technical expertise. The tools for creating and distributing content are available to nearly everyone.

That's opened the door for millions of people to build audiences and businesses that couldn't have existed a generation ago. But those same tools are available to your competitors as well.

For creators and media companies, that's creating a problem. The traditional model of building an audience with content and then monetizing that attention through advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, or other forms of Content Revenue is becoming a less reliable foundation for a sustainable business.

The problem isn't that content stopped working. People still watch videos, listen to podcasts, read newsletters, follow creators, and seek out information and entertainment every day.

To understand why the old model is becoming less reliable, you have to understand how we got here—and how the economics of content changed along the way.

Before the Internet, Creating and Distributing Content Was Hard

Before the internet, reaching a large audience with content was expensive and difficult. You needed equipment and infrastructure. Newspapers and magazines needed printing presses and delivery networks. Radio and television required studios, transmitters, and specialized equipment.

You also needed a staff that knew how to operate this equipment. Producing professional content required writers, editors, designers, photographers, producers, engineers, and other specialists with training and experience.

Together, these requirements created a Barrier to Entry: an obstacle that makes it difficult or expensive for new competitors to enter a market. You couldn't simply decide one morning to start a television network, radio station, or newspaper.

That limited the number of organizations that could compete for attention. The high Barrier to Entry didn't guarantee that a media company would succeed, but it protected established companies from an endless stream of new competitors. It also limited the amount of content available for people to consume.

As a result, in the pre-internet era, content was relatively scarce. The primary constraint wasn't people's attention; it was the ability to produce and distribute enough content to compete for it.

The Internet Democratized Publishing

The internet began tearing down the barriers that had made creating and distributing content so difficult.

A new generation of digital tools made professional publishing possible without the capital and expertise required to run a printing press, radio station, or television network. Content Management Systems like WordPress made publishing websites accessible to people who couldn't code. Email Service Providers like Mailchimp made it easy to distribute newsletters. Platforms like YouTube, social media, and podcast hosting services gave creators access to audiences without the need for traditional media infrastructure. Tools like Canva made professional design accessible without specialized training.

As these tools became cheaper and easier to use, the Barrier to Entry fell.

Businesses that once relied heavily on newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television networks to reach potential customers could now become publishers themselves. This fueled the rise of modern Content Marketing: creating and distributing content to attract, educate, or retain an audience in pursuit of a business goal.

Individuals could use the same tools to build audiences of their own. Bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, newsletter writers, and other creators could reach thousands or even millions of people without owning expensive equipment.

Creators could build Content Revenue businesses that created value through content, monetizing that value through advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, and other mechanisms.

Success depended on attracting and sustaining an audience's attention.
The result was an explosion in the supply of content. The limiting factor shifted from the ability to produce and distribute content to the ability to capture people's attention. This is the Attention Economy: an economic environment in which organizations compete for people's limited attention.

The internet democratized publishing, but it also democratized competition.

The Content Arms Race

As more content creators and media companies competed for people's attention, they looked for ways to gain an advantage.

If better content could capture more attention, the logical response was to invest in creating more and better content. They published more frequently and invested in better storytelling, higher production values, stronger hooks, and more sophisticated design.

These strategies worked. Content creators and media companies that invested more in their content could capture more attention.
But their competitors could do the same thing.

As more competitors adopted these strategies, the standard rose. One channel became two, then three, then four. A blog expanded into a newsletter, a podcast, video, and social clips. Content creators and media companies optimized for search engines and algorithms and repurposed each piece of content across multiple platforms.

This is ContentMaxxing: the practice of continually creating, improving, optimizing, distributing, or automating content in pursuit of more attention.

When competitors ContentMaxx in response to one another, it creates a Content Arms Race: escalating competition among organizations to produce more, better, and faster content in pursuit of attention.
The Content Arms Race started long before generative AI, but AI accelerated it by making it possible to produce more content in less time.

Investing more in content could provide a meaningful competitive advantage, but there was a problem with an arms race: everyone kept producing more. Eventually, all of that content changed the economics of the market.

Content Shock Changed the Economics of Content

In 2014, marketing strategist Mark Schaefer gave a name to what happens when the Content Arms Race runs into the limits of human attention: Content Shock.

In his influential article, “Content Shock: Why Content Marketing Is Not a Sustainable Strategy,” Schaefer described two forces moving in opposite directions: the supply of content was exploding, while people's ability to consume it was finite.

Content Shock occurs when the supply of content outpaces people's ability to consume it, making attention increasingly difficult and expensive to earn.

Schaefer argued that as competition for attention increased, content producers would need to invest more just to maintain the same results. Eventually, he wrote, “the amount I am ‘paying out’ will exceed the amount I am bringing in.”

In other words, the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

Schaefer was writing primarily about Content Marketing, but the same economic test can be applied to a business built around Content Revenue. For a Content Revenue business, you've reached Content Shock when additional investment in creating more or better content no longer creates enough competitive advantage to justify that investment.
This is a fundamental change in the economics of content.

To understand why, we need to look at one of the most basic principles in economics: supply and demand.

The Laws of Supply and Demand Won

The basic economics are simple: when demand exceeds supply, scarcity drives value up. When supply exceeds demand, abundance drives value down.

That's what happened to content.

For most of the 20th century, the difficulty of producing and distributing content constrained supply. The internet removed those constraints, and the Content Arms Race drove supply even higher. But the amount of attention available to consume all that content remained limited.

The result is Content Oversupply, in which more content is produced than people have the attention to consume. When supply exceeds the attention available to consume it, each piece of content has to compete against more alternatives for the same scarce resource. If you don't listen to one podcast, you can easily find another. If you don't subscribe to one newsletter, there are countless alternatives. If you don't watch one video, there are millions more waiting for you.

The problem isn't simply that there's an enormous amount of content. There's an enormous amount of good content.

As high-quality alternatives become abundant, quality becomes less effective as a competitive advantage. This leads to Content Commoditization: as content becomes increasingly abundant and interchangeable, it becomes harder for any individual piece of content to stand out or command a premium.

Creating something good is no longer enough to make it scarce.
In short, excess supply drives the economic value down—even when quality goes up.

Content Revenue Is a Less Durable Business Model

Content Shock affects businesses built around Content Marketing and Content Revenue differently. For a business using Content Marketing, content supports another business goal. For a business built around Content Revenue, the business creates value through content, and its success depends on attracting and sustaining an audience's attention.

In other words, for a business using Content Marketing, Content Shock puts pressure on a marketing strategy; but for a business built around Content Revenue, it puts pressure on the business model itself.
As a result, relying on content alone has become a less sustainable foundation for a business.

ContentMaxxing Doesn't Solve the Problem

Faced with increasing competition for attention, the natural response is to ContentMaxx. But this creates two dangers.

First, it can lead to burnout. The Content Arms Race demands an ever-increasing investment of time, money, and energy just to remain competitive.

The second danger is more fundamental: ContentMaxxing distracts from the real problem.

The problem isn't simply that you aren't producing enough content or that your content isn't good enough. The Content Revenue business model has become less sustainable because the high Barrier to Entry that once made content scarce has largely disappeared.

Creating more or better content doesn't restore that barrier. In fact, when everybody responds the same way, it adds even more content to an already oversupplied market.

You can't solve an abundance problem by creating more of the thing that's abundant.

If Content Isn't Enough...

The internet eliminated the scarcity that once protected Content Revenue businesses.

To build a more durable business, content creators and media companies need to create value from something that’s scarce once again—something competitors can't easily produce, copy, or replace.

And that something isn't content.