So What: More Thinking Edition
I kind of phoned in that last one. Also, I use a lot of bold in this one.
[This is an installment of a serial article that is being gathered here. -D ]
There are 4 primary reasons that a business puts content on the web: Support, Sales and Reputation, Paid Subscription, and Visitor Volume.
All four have the same core purpose: turn a consumer’s time into either revenue or savings.1 Which means they need to be discovered, and then in most cases they need to retain.
Right now, the primary way to be discovered is to be ranked highly in a Google search result. The method for achieving said high ranking is a dark art known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO); sites want to make sure that seekers find them, and Google wants seekers to find something good (so they come back to Google next time). SEO is the rules of that game.
Business, for the most part, is pretty logical.
. . .
The term multi-channel has meant many things over the life of broadcast media, and I’m going to adopt it here in a manner similar to how marketing people use it — which is to say a similar message pushed out over many different platforms.
Producing at your own expense, for someone else to repackage and sell, isn’t sustainable.
The new model, the push-based, AI-controlled, aggregator-distributor model, heavily favors a multi-channel approach for content distribution because, and here’s the quote, SEO is on its way to irrelevancy.
Explain yourself, heretic!
Okay. Besides the big important point we’ve covered so far, namely that content consumption is moving, in large part, from pull (search) to push (scroll), let’s do this exercise:
Do a Google search for the answer to a question.
See if you get your answer without ever leaving Google-owned properties.
Ask ChatGPT the same question.
See if you get a satisfactory answer from ChatGPT.
In more and more cases, the search results from Google will be an “AI” generated answer. No additional click, no off-network ads are viewed. Sure, there’s (maybe) a link to the source for the data, but it’s not a monetized impression. Similarly, ChatGPT and its Algernine cousins are happy to answer rather than refer, because that’s actually what seekers want.
But what that means to the source, the site from which Google and Algernon learned (or stole, depending on your point of view) their information, is that someone else is monetizing their content. (Monetizing instead of, not just monetizing also.)
Producing at your own expense, for someone else to repackage and sell, isn’t sustainable - and on this point you don’t have to trust me, your balance sheet will tell you soon enough.
Business, for the most part, is pretty logical.
Now we can start the crystal ball thing.
If this doesn’t describe your content strategy, I’d suggest you don’t actually have a content strategy, you have an expense line. (Unless you’re not for profit; then replace “revenue” with a metric related to mission success.)