In 1996, Bill Gates penned an essay explaining that “content is king”. Signs are increasingly pointing to this being outdated.
When Bill Gates wrote an essay in 1996 saying that “content is king”, that became a maxim for web development for decades. The concept is pretty simple. In a nutshell, if you create good quality content, you’re bound to generate revenue and the audiences will follow. Ask anyone out there if they like good quality content and it’s brain dead obvious that people are largely going to say “yes”. The thing is, as time progressed, there have been questions on the relevance of this maxim.
The thing to remember is that the internet in 1996 (or even 2000 for that matter) was a much different place. Websites were just starting up, design concepts were still being refined, and the amount of content was considerably smaller. As a result, it was pretty obvious if you wrote good quality content, the audiences were going to come sooner or later. After all, competition was much fewer and farther between.
Of course, as the years progressed, the content on the internet got better. More talented people started generating content online and quickly got their names. This was especially true in the news space. More and more people used the internet for the high quality content. Arguably, the high quality content is what has even gotten to the point of killing traditional forms of entertainment. Many traditional outlets simply rested on their laurels and shovelled out low quality garbage believing that the audiences will always be there (spoiler: they weren’t, necessarily).
When I got my start in 2005, I got to experience this “content is king” maxim in full action. I would work hard, gather the facts, do the research, speak to people, and put together great news articles along with other fellow writers. As a result, the traffic flowed in to the website I worked for. My articles regularly got shared on news aggregator websites and I built a very good name for myself.
When I eventually moved to another website, the traffic followed. People wanted to read what someone like myself had to write. I was all too happy to enthusiastically oblige audiences. My work got regularly shared on news aggregation sites, the traffic flowed in, and all was well.
Around 2013, I started building my own website. Early on, I wrote regular articles and my work regularly got posted up on news aggregator websites. I was thrilled that I could seemingly make it on my own. I had built plans that as the revenue started rolling in that I could hire staff to help write content and I would help usher in a new generation of news writers on digital rights. The website, for its part, was never really about me in particular, but rather, a medium from which others can help build up. Little did I know what would happen next.
The quality of the content I produced never changed, but the internet around me, on the other hand, was changing. News aggregator websites suddenly stopped posting my links to their front pages. The reason that was passed along to me was that my stuff was suddenly considered “unreliable” because it wasn’t a major news publication. The quality of the writing was never in doubt, but rather, my website wasn’t famous enough. You can imagine my massive “WTF?” reaction to this. Of course, still believing the maxim of “content is king”, I didn’t really let this bother me too much because others were bound to pick up my stuff as it got shared on social media afterwards.
Indeed, I saw some of my content getting widely shared on social media. I would see traffic spikes going to my site from time to time. One thing I did notice was that the traffic spikes weren’t quite generating the revenue I was expecting. I simply chalked that up to bad timing with advertising and moved on. So a traffic spike didn’t generate the usual couple of dozens of dollars, that happens. We’ll get it on the next one.
What I didn’t realize was that the loss in revenue was actually something happening beneath the surface. In 2022, explosive allegations were levied against Google where publisher revenue, since 2013 (the year I started the site, go figure), Google was allegedly suppressing publisher revenue by as much as 40%. As a result, gradually dropping revenue despite higher traffic suddenly made sense. For context, if I had 40% additional revenue, I would have easily broken even and gotten to the business of reinvesting that money to help make the website better.
No matter, that’s why I set up Patreon and Ko-Fi. This to allow users to support Freezenet financially, circumventing the pitfalls of Adsense. Unfortunately, the ad revenue kept plummeting. COVID-19 saw ad revenue take a hit despite traffic going up on the site back in 2019. Then, this year, the ad revenue dropped a further roughly 75% starting in January. This despite content actually improving on the site.
What was also very noticeable was the fact that traffic started dropping in June (which by no means matches up with the adsense performance drop from much earlier). Again, this didn’t have anything to do with changes to the quality of content (if anything, the quality is improving), but rather, this likely has something to do with something I covered earlier this year. Specifically, in May, I reported on changes made by Google where Google was pushing AI answers to the top of the page. In fact, even in Canada, we get AI answers instead of links to other websites. Here’s an example of this that I saw today which really speaks to the irony of this whole situation:
You’ll notice that an AI answer is provided right at the very top of the search results. If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or general web design, the problem with this screenshot from a third party website perspective is very obvious. Most people who scan through a web page look at the top part first and work their way down. The further down you are on the page, the less likely you are to click on something when presented a series of links.
So, Google rolls out AI Overview in May and Freezenet’s traffic begins plummeting in June. There’s no way that is just a coincidence. The effect is obvious: people are having a much harder time finding Freezenet. When people are having a harder time finding Freezenet, then it makes it harder to hope for people supporting the site financially, negating the problems of ad revenue plummeting.
So, uh, what’s the answer here to this problem? I do have plans of rolling out content related to more modern gaming, but if few people are able to find that content, it may not really matter as much. You could write the best quality content out there and if you don’t have celebrity status, it doesn’t really matter that much.
One option is to focus in on marketing on social media. This is something Freezenet has done for years now (especially on YouTube and Mastodon), but maybe this is something that could be focused on more? What about dolling out money for online advertising? That’s supposed to be a great way to reach new audiences.
Of course, the common theme to all of this is that the solutions have little to nothing to do with creating high quality content. Instead, it is purely marketing and employing what amounts to a pay to win scheme. That leads us back to the premise of the whole article as seen in the title.
Is content still king on the internet today? I’m not really all that convinced that it is. The strongest case that can be made is that if you focus on something like YouTube, then high quality content is still alive and well. Even then, though, that comes with the caveat that you have to produce content for a specific platform. The original premise is that you can produce high quality content wherever you want and you would become successful. There was no asterisk to really speak of and this argument adds a pretty big asterisk if you ask me.
To be clear, Freezenet isn’t going anywhere. I’ve personally had everything taken away from me twice before and that didn’t deter me in the past. I’m not about to allow this setback to deter me. After all, this website was set up in part as a giant “fuck you” to everyone and everything that told me that I was never going to be successful. Taking 95% of my traffic away isn’t going to make a difference. Damn the odds, I say.
Still, with all the changes I’ve seen in how the web operates, I don’t believe an argument can be made that says that “content is king” is alive and well. You can write the best most high quality content in the world and it won’t necessarily lead to success. Quantity won’t make a difference, either (My over 5,000 pages on this site can attest to that). Is the internet a giant pay to win scheme? Is it a marketers game these days? Is it pure luck? Is it a click bait world? Is it just rage farming? I don’t really know the answer to that. What I do know is that “content is king” is a dead concept. All the data I have and a good healthy dose of looking around pretty much concludes as such.
