In The Age of A.I., Content Is Not King (My Podfest 2024 Masterclass)

Last week, the good folks at Podfest asked me to deliver a masterclass as part of their virtual summit, "A.I. & Creator Tools." I chose to spoke not about a specific A.I. tool used for content creation, but rather about a new strategy for capturing people's attention in a very noisy environment. Now you, too, can watch the class that I gave.

TRANSCRIPT:

Content is not king.

Not anymore.

Used to be king.

In fact, the phrase content is king comes from a famous essay that was written in 1996 by Bill Gates, and we've all come to accept it as truth.

And look, for a while, content had a good rein, but we're gonna talk in this presentation about why, especially because of AI, content isn't king anymore and what you as a content creator and a podcaster can do about it.

I'm Seth Resler.

I'm the founder of Community Marketing Revolution, and I help arts and entertainment brands, including podcasters, launch, grow, and monetize their own communities.

There's Too Much Content

Let me tell you a little bit about myself:

I am a cord cutter.

We do not subscribe to cable channels in my house.

Instead, we've got all these different streaming services, and you probably do too at home.

And let me tell you about the nightly ritual that happens in my household.

Every evening, my girlfriend and I sit down in front of the TV, and we open up Netflix or one of the other streaming services.

And we try to figure out what we want to watch.

We start pulling up trailers and watching them.

Before you know it, an hour and a half has gone by, and we say, "You know what? It's too late to watch anything. Let's just go to bed."

What's happening here is that there is simply too much content to consume, and it's not just a problem for the content consumers.

It's also a problem for the content creators.

This was a headline in February in The New Yorker.

"Is the media prepared for an extinction level event?"

Because all of these media organizations have revenue models that are premised on a world where content is scarce.

And we don't live in that world anymore.

When I began my career, if you wanted to create content and get it to reach a mass audience, it took big expensive equipment, like a printing press or a radio tower or a television studio, not anymore.

Now, anybody with a cell phone and an internet connection can create content and can send it around the world.

But all those content creators are competing for the same thing.

They're all competing for attention.

That's the finite resource.

And it's gotten harder than ever to cut through.

"More Better" Content Won't Work

Now what do you do about this? Well, the traditional answer is to create more better content.

This is what every consultant will tell you.

This is what every marketing blog will tell you.

This is what every guru and expert will tell you.

Sometimes they'll say, "Oh, you need to create content for every social media platform out there."

Sometimes they'll say, "Oh, you need to optimize your content for search engines."

Or, "You need to use data to target your content better," or, "You need to do storytelling."

These are all variations of the same piece of advice.

Which is to create more better content.

In a vacuum, that's not bad advice.

You should create higher quality content, and you should produce as much as you can, but there's a problem.

And that problem is that everybody is getting the exact same advice.

Everybody's being told to create more better content.

What happens when we all create more better content? We wind up in a content arms race.

Where everybody is just pumping out more and more and more, everybody winds up getting less attention as a result.

And that's before we even start to talk about A.I.

That is going to flood the internet with tons of content.

This whole idea that content is king is premised on scarcity.

But when everybody has a crown and everybody has an army and everybody has a throne, then nobody's king.

You've seen Game of Thrones.

You know what this leads to.

It's just a lot of bloodshed on the battlefield.

So that raises a question.

What comes after content?

I'm going to let you in on 3 secrets that I'm going to share with you that will show you how you can continue to thrive even in a world where everybody including artificial intelligence can create content.

Secret #1

Let's start with Secret Number 1.

The riches are in building spaces for the niches.

Over 10 years ago, I launched a podcast called Taste Trekkers.

It was a podcast for foodies who love travel and travelers who love food.

And the podcast did pretty well, but it wasn't enough that I was generating the kind of revenue that I wanted.

So what did we do? I launched a website where we produced even more content.

And sure enough, we started to see traffic from Google.

But still wasn't producing the type of revenue that I wanted to see.

And so I went to Kickstarter.

I raised $15,000, and I hosted the nation's first food tourism conference in Providence, Rhode Island.

My goal was to sell tickets to the general public for about $30 a pop.

And I figured that there were lots of people in Rhode Island who liked to eat, so this shouldn't be a problem.

And yet, I struggled to sell tickets.

With one exception, and that exception was the food tourism professionals that I had interviewed on my podcast as a guest.

They spent a lot of money to be at this event.

And I was shocked.

So the next year, I did something different.

I added a second day to the food tourism conference, an Industry Day.

Keep in mind there are a lot more people who eat food in Rhode Island than there are food tours and professionals all over the world.

Yet we sold out Industry Day like that, and I again struggled to sell tickets to the general public.

I learned something from If you are a food tourism professional, there are not a lot of other people in your city that you can talk to about what you do.

So when I created a space for all these food tours and professionals to come together, they jumped at the chance to be there.

They were willing to spend a lot of money to be in that space.

That brings me to my first point about community.

A community is a group of people with a shared mission.

And to build community, you must create a space for these people to gather.

Secret #2

So let's get into secret number 2: Building spaces is easier than ever.

You see, once upon a time, in order to build spaces you actually had to physically build a building.

You might build an office.

You might build a church.

You might build a school.

Or you might build a baseball park, but you needed a physical space in order to make this happen, not anymore.

This brings me to the difference between what we've all been using the internet for for the last 30 years, which is creating content and what we now have the ability to use it for today, and that is to build spaces.

But let's take a look at the difference between an audience and a community because they're not the same thing.

We all know how to build an audience.

In order to do that, you create content and that content attracts the audience.

In order to build community, you create a space and the community members gather in that space.

What's the difference between an audience and a community? Audience members don't talk to each other.

Community members do talk to each other.

In fact, that interaction is the key defining characteristic of community.

If you look at the internet over the last 30 years, again, you used to need a printing press or a radio tower or a television studio.

Now, we have tools like WordPress and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok where we can create content and publish it out to the world.

But there's a new set of tools out there and this new set of tools I call space building tools.

These are things like Zoom or Slack or Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups.

So we no longer need to create physical buildings for people to get together.

We can now create spaces digitally.

This makes it possible for everybody to build community.

Secret #3

That brings me to secret number 3: You are a Serendipity Engineer.

Serendipity is when 2 people come together and in the fortuitous meeting, something big comes out of it.

Maybe they start a company, maybe they start a band, maybe they get married, you never know.
It could be anything.

Now you cannot make serendipity happen, but you can create conditions under which serendipity is more likely to happen.

That's what we as people who are building a space for community members to gather are trying to do.
It's all about creating connections between people that didn't exist before in the hopes that it sparks some serendipity.

So those are my 3 secrets:

Number 1, the riches are in building spaces for the niches.

Number 2, building spaces is easier than ever thanks to new technology.

And number 3, you are a Serendipity Engineer.

You can create a space where new connections can flourish and something magical might come out of it.

Now, in this short talk, I don't have time to talk about how you monetize a community, but I do have a guide called 50 ways to monetize a community that you can download for free.

You can do that either by going to my website, CommunityMarketingRevolution.com, or you can scan this QR code, and it'll take you right to this free resource.

Again, I'm Seth Resler from Community Marketing Revolution, and here's what I want you thinking about as both a podcaster and as a content creator:

The question is not how can you create more better content? Because that's not going to help you cut through anymore.

We no longer live in an age where content is king.

Because now even the AI can create content.

Now the question you should be asking is, how can I build a community?

And don't ask, "How can I build a community around my content?"

Ask, "How can I create content that will serve my community?"

Because again, content is not king, not anymore, not in the age of A.I.

These days, community is king.