Content Marketing is dead. Long live Content Marketing.

In a recent meeting with an investor, I received some familiar advice — “you guys should focus on creating some content.”

“Start a blog.”

“Get active on Twitter.”

“Drive in users through LinkedIn.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is good advice. That’s why I’m here in the first place, isn’t it? But the challenge I’m trying to mitigate against is that if you’re like me, you’re absolutely drowning in content (truthfully, I’m amazed you’re reading this to begin with).

I scroll through my LinkedIn feed or I open up Twitter and everyone wants to tell me something. Unfortunately at this point, I’m numbed by the noise.

We live in an era where journalism as a profession is barely hanging on, but at the same time everyone has become a writer (or at least they’ve been told they need to become a writer). That’s led to this:

Since 2012 (coincidentally, the same year Medium was founded), “content marketing” has exploded. It’s become so easy and inexpensive to reach a wide audience that everyone rushed in and started talking. The sad part is best captured by the red line in the chart above. As interest in content marketing exploded, we’ve seen much less traction in “thought leadership.” Even though everyone’s talking, no one’s really saying anything that matters.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that “if you’re looking for real thought leadership, you’ve come to the right place!” But rather, if you’re like me and you’re trying to build a startup and get in front of your target users, there’s a real challenge in cutting through the noise and to creating material that people actually want to read. But that’s all a part of what I want to achieve with my time here on Medium. To document what I learn through the course of building something.

I want to be perfectly clear — the primary reason I’m doing this is for content marketing reasons. I want people to read what I write on Medium, to check out the startup I’m building (www.mayday.am), and ultimately become users of our product.

But I also hope to add some value through this process. I hope to contribute more to the read line than to the blue line.