When I find myself preaching about making “good” content, in the back of my mind I always wonder how fundamentally full of crap I really am.

This is a post for you to muse along with me about just that question.

Content is not King. If it were, all you would need to do to be successful is generate the best stuff. Anyone who has ever spent any time marketing content and seen absolutely brilliant pieces of work die on the vine due to poor execution and random chance knows that the “Content is King” crowd are missing the point –

What is that point?

To start, it’s not about Content, it’s about Context. It’s about when you wrote your book, or filmed your movie or began your startup. It’s about when, where, and how you decided to market the work and to who. It’s about what you ate for breakfast that morning and how it informed your business model. It’s about the ecosystem around content and how that ecosystem intersected with the timing of your creation.

It’s about a lot of complicated things that most of us are absolutely unwilling to admit we have little control over.

My thought though is that maybe even this perspective is too narrow. Maybe the problem isn’t the content or the context but the ecosystem itself.

Let’s explore.

As you may know, content very rarely dies.

If you write a book or make a movie it lives on pretty much forever. After a while, many things do fall out of favor but most everything retains some tiny sliver of our attention. There is a collector for everything, and everything is eventually collected, trust me, there is a guy somewhere who has in his possession the Egyptian equivalent of cocktail napkins and he is devoting his life to unraveling their mysteries as we speak.

Over time we have also become much better at turning out content. Right now, thousands of e-books are being churned out on some desk somewhere and being sold into some niche market. While 99.98% of these will only be read by the author, some fraction of them will draw the attention of a crowd large enough to warrant our attention. As the volume of content produced increases, the number of these attention worthy creations increases as well.

Meanwhile, the overall supply of attention is shrinking. We have less and less time to consume more and more information. We have tools that do nothing but feed us vast quantities of the stuff in an undifferentiated menagerie of words, pictures and moving images. Most of it is candy-coated garbage, another large portion of it is empty intellectual calories composed mostly of rehashed ideas and pictures of cute cats, and a tiny fraction of the remainder is entertaining but useful bits of stuff that manages to break through the noise and capture some share of our attention.

This is where we live, and where is that exactly? Let’s add it all up, we have an exponentially increasing supply of content, a relatively stable rate at which that content is integrated into the ecosystem of “attention worthy” creations and a shrinking amount of attention to give.

I’m no economist but I’d say we are all living in InflationLand.

Content is being supplied to the market in such huge quantities that the price of consuming it is climbing at rates that content creators simply can’t keep up with. Audiences that might have flocked to a perfectly average blog post a few years ago now won’t even budge unless it has a sporty title, a huge marketing platform or (in much rarer instances) such incredible quality that they are forced to take notice.

More and more the medicine we proscribe for this makes less and less sense.

We used to talk about finding a niche. We preached this because we implicitly understood the supply and demand problem. We wanted to find markets that were being underserved and flood those with content for a while. Now, everyone is searching out their own little piece of the “Long Tail” paradise and sooner or later the valid, marketable ones are going to dry up. Sure we’ll always have Venezuelan Collectible cups but there is only so much money that can be made there.

We used to talk about building an audience. That was great five years ago when audience choice was limited. Now I can find 800 blogs covering whatever half-baked idea I could dream up. My choice isn’t really what community I want to join, but what’s easiest to find within the context of the search tools I use. I am not aiming for quality, quality costs too much attention and I have a business to run or taxes to do. I’m aiming for expediency with a dash of entertainment and I will satisfice my way to it.

With all this in mind I think it’s time to admit that the problem with your content is, in fact, everyone elses content (it could also suck but that’s another post). The problem with the democratization of ideas is that people aren’t machines and we don’t always make rational choices — we make fast choices and when there is an unlimited number of them to make we often make less than optimal ones. We pick things that are available to us readily, we pick things that our friends tell us about, we pick things that are loud, obnoxious or backed by enough money to make it out past the noise we’ve created around ourselves.

Confused? Try to imagine a menu that contained every single style of hamburger on the planet Earth. Ask yourself how good you would be at selecting the absolute best one for you. That’s the problem with content and it’s a problem that is only going to get worse.

So, what’s the solution?

A big part of it is simply admitting that just because your content doesn’t “do well” (e.g. lives up to your off-kilter expectations), it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good. So much of what makes you successful is generating enough volume in a good enough quality to make it past the noise threshold. Get it through your head that if you pay your dues, you may be rewarded, just don’t assume that reward is 100,000 new visitors.

The second part is getting used to little victories. One extra person who enjoys your stuff is an amazing accomplishment. You’ve managed to get a slice of the attention that they were squirreling away for the Winter. You did something that might have been easy when we all had a lot more time to burn, but now really shows the strength of your effort and convictions.

Finally, build business models around your content that don’t require such huge volumes to be successful. People always act as if there are unlimited numbers of people with an unlimited amount of time out there just searching for new stuff to spend hours on. There aren’t. You aren’t. Your audience is like you, they pick up new things slowly and once they find something they like they stick to it for the most part. The news they consume, the books they read, the movies they watch and the applications they use are all drawn from a relatively shallow pool. Sure, they add to it every so often but when they do it’s kind of a big deal.

Make a business that relies on a small, rabid group of superfans doing something that brings value to their lives and paying you for it. If you happen to draw more people in at the same time, great but realize that piling people like cord wood is a bad business model for most of us.

Context and perspective make the world go round. That’s why I think that even if I’m wrong and the problem isn’t nearly as bad as I believe it is, we would all still do well to take a close look at our creations and expectations and see just how full of crap we really are.

Who knows, you might even like it.

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