Content v. Art

And how I'm doing less of the former in favor of the latter.

A few weeks ago I was watching a podcast on YouTube between a couple of guys who cover the online creator industry and some of the most successful participants in the online creator industry. One of the podcast guests did a great job of describing the difference between content and art and how they can both be valuable because of how they serve different purposes.

Everyone reading this is at least a consumer of online content—you are reading this email, after all—and perhaps a number of you are even online content creators yourself in some way. So this is good for all of us to consider either as creators or consumers.

Content Flows Through You

Content has been commodified. I’ve written at length about this somewhere, but honestly I don’t remember where at this point. A quick search of the newsletter archives tells me I’ve mentioned it here, but I’m likely thinking of someplace in my books that I’ve talked at length about the commodification of content. I can’t be bothered to go hunting right now. 

What does it mean and why does it matter that content is commodified? It means that “content” within the confines of online content/internet content/social media content is best understood as transactional fodder to deliver value from one party to another in the form of entertainment, information, or otherwise. More content is posted to the internet in a single day than any single person can consume in a hundred lifetimes (Like, literally. I’m not exaggerating here.) 

Content is like cattle—something that is herded around the internet and consumed for some kind of value it provides. It is not so much appreciated for what it is. Few farmers have cows to simply look at them and appreciate them for their beauty. Most cows are on farms to provide dairy products or be sent off to the butcher. 

That’s what content is on the internet. Content is some kind of media that we consume for a utilitarian purpose and rarely appreciate for what it is. It’s ephemeral. Content is meant to flow through us. It’s 30 second TikToks. It’s 800-word blog posts. It’s 12-minute YouTube videos. And it’s usually in service of something. It’s meant to provoke a donation, a sale, or a sign-up/subscription of some kind. 

Content is also usually optimized to play into the various algorithms and systems that run our social internet such that it maximizes the kind of engagement that it seeks, and this usually comes at the cost of aesthetics. One example of this is YouTube thumbnails and titling strategies. The gaudy thumbnails and ALL CAPS TITLES of many videos made by top YouTube creators look objectively desperate and lame, but the numbers show that they work, so utilitarian content creators lean into whatever will make their commodity move.

Content is ephemeral, transactional media that is usually meant to flow through you and perhaps provoke you to take some kind of action. It is not meant to be beautiful. It is not often meant to be deep or truly meaningful. It is a commodity meant for trade. This is in contrast with art.

Art Sticks With You

Art, in the context of internet media, is unlike content in that it is not meant to support a transaction of any kind. Art is meant to stick with you, not flow through you like content. The purpose of art, even when created for the internet, is to be appreciated for what it is. This is, of course, in contrast to content, which is created for the express purpose of transaction. Let me share an example.

A YouTuber who has a million subscribers got that many subscribers by creating tons of content. This particular creator posted three-to-five 12-20 minute YouTube videos every day for the better part of two years, optimizing thumbnails and titles, keywording descriptions for SEO, collaborating with other creators, and doing everything else a YouTube content creator needs to do in order to create the right amount and style of content to grab the millions of eyeballs looking for billions of hours of video content everyday.

Amid his meteoric rise, this YouTube wants to stop creating his thrice weekly 15-minute videos of goofy pranks and skits he does with his friends—it’s not his favorite kind of content to make, but it works—and make a truly meaningful documentary of a local restaurant in his hometown that came back from the brink of going out of business during the pandemic and is now more successful than ever. The problem is, in the mind of the YouTuber, that in order to actually make that deep, meaningful documentary, he would have to stop the flow of his content, which would result in the likely loss of thousands of subscribers or potential subscribers.

The content creator must sacrifice attention to make art. But it is the attention he accrues that gives him the audience for any art he creates. This is the rub.

This is why, if you pay attention to this stuff like I do, you see a lot of online content creators “play the game” to a certain level of success with which they are comfortable to slow down. At which point they slow the grind, enjoy their riches, and start making more of the artful sorts of media they actually like to create. Money and fame are less of a concern for the one who has made it to whatever mountaintop she has constructed in her mind.

Of course, the best way forward for that creator is to create just enough ephemeral “content” to keep the audience coming back for more of the candy they want while also cooking up a delicious meal to serve less frequently. A media meal the content creator is actually proud of in the form of a documentary, a book, a piece of visual art, or whatever else is more meaningful than “content” that is used for some kind of transaction.

That brings me to a bit of a personal reflection.

My Work Moving Forward

This newsletter is, mostly, content. Outside of the occasional reflection on parenting or the like, I’m churning out two newsletters a week in order to serve you with information and instruction, grow a list of subscribers, and support my writing and speaking out. Believe it or not, I don’t find this to be a particularly “artful” exercise. I am for all intents and purposes a content creator via this newsletter. 

Even my books (The Wolf in Their Pockets and Terms of Service) are sort of “content,” you could say, in that I am providing you with information for a fee. But the books I write are more artful than the newsletter in that they are meant to stick with you (art) rather than flow through you (content), and I suspect this newsletter does more flowing that sticking most weeks.

So that brings me to how I’m about to change my writing rhythms for the foreseeable future.

If you’re new around here you may not know that I will be stepping away from this newsletter in just a couple of weeks. In fact the newsletter that sends two Tuesdays from today will be the last one for at least the rest of 2023, and probably forever.

To make a long story very short, I’ve spent most of my personal writing career cranking out lots of content (newsletters/blogs) in the hope of eventually creating art (books). See, if you’re someone who isn’t famous like me, the primary way you get “permission” to publish a book in the eyes of many agents and publishers is by accumulating an audience and/or building a “platform,” and the way this is best done is through creating copious amounts of online content. Once you create enough content and attract an appropriate number of people, you are invited to create art in the form of books. 

I’ve done that now. I’ve had the privilege of writing two non-fiction books about social media and our relationship with it. I have accomplished my goal, even if the books haven’t sold well enough to guarantee me future opportunities to publish.

Now I’m ready to move on to primarily focusing on creating art rather than spending most of my time creating content in hopes of one day getting to create art. 

I don’t know if that makes sense, but I hope it does.

As you can imagine, an author like me only has so much time and energy to devote to personal writing efforts. I don’t get to write for my day job, so my primary writing time is from about 5:30-7am and sometimes between 8-10pm, though I’m usually too tired to do any writing worth reading once my daughter is in bed. My best writing opportunity and production tends to come in that small morning window and on weekends in a similar, but extended time-slot.¹

Given my limited time and energy, I have to be pretty selective about what I write. Outside of the two books I’ve published in the last two years, virtually 100% of my writing effort has been given to this newsletter. Or maybe 90% of it with 10% reserved for writing for other outlets. 

Now, that energy will be directed elsewhere. To more artful writing work than churning out regular content. 

Content and art are both valuable, but if you’re reading this as an aspiring or active writer, you know that you have to be choosy about how you direct your energy. And I’m shifting mine. I will reflect more in a couple of weeks in the final newsletter.

1. Virtually all of the combined ~130,000 words of Terms and Wolf were written on weekdays between 5-7am and weekends between 5-9am.