Creators Become The Commodity
In any crowdsourced market or gig economy environment, the basic service provider ultimately ends up being replaceable
I like to think that my ideas are special. Little individualised snowflakes that are hewn from the vast array of experiences and knowledge I’ve acquired over the years.
I pour over my keyboard, smashing out prose into the late hours of the night even after working a full day already. The writing itself energizes me to keep going and provides me with a sense of accomplishment the moment I submit to publish.
But let’s not mince words… I like the idea of getting paid for those ideas.
I didn’t join the Medium Partner Program by mistake.
Having said that, I know how these platforms tend to work — I’ve been down this road before, this isn’t my first rodeo on crowdsourced content platforms.
I woke up this morning and read a post by Michael K. Spencer where he expressed the idea that indie creators on Medium are seeing volatile changes in their revenue and exposure, and what that means for the future.
That got me to thinking…
For a few years, I’ve been saying that people who create valuable content on platforms they don’t own are just digital sharecroppers. We cultivate someone else’s land, give them an increasingly larger portion of our crops, and in return, our parcels of land are shrunk so that more sharecroppers can generate more rent for the landowners, and essentially compete with us by lowering the value of our crops.
What ends up happening is that the sharecroppers themselves become the commodity.
We are easily replaceable because there are always more sharecroppers willing to take up our meagre plots of land.
Where we were used to receiving a certain return on our investment of effort for our content, these new people are starting from a zero base, and for many of them, 1 is better than 0.
Some people will look at this and say, “It’s not worth the effort” but a lot of people will say, “I get to create content AND get paid? Ticketyboo, where do I sign up for this?”
From the platform owner’s perspective, having individuals garnering wide audiences on their platforms is great, until it isn’t.
These “influencers” become a risk that needs to be managed and the best way to ultimately minimize that is by controlling the flow of traffic and exposure.
And independent content providers are actually exacerbating the problem.
When Creators Become The Low-Value Commodity
Think of it this way…
Let’s say that you’re writing about underwater basket weaving on Medium.
You’ve built up a following of 5000 followers, you get hundreds of views and claps for every story you publish, and your monthly income from Medium is stable and strong.
If you decide to start publishing on your own blog or create a Patreon or move to Substack, you potentially are then competing with Medium for wallet-share of subscribers.
Simultaneously, other “creators” start seeing your success and then they start writing articles (there’s a difference between an article and a story in my view) about underwater basket weaving.
Medium’s algorithms make the connection and start showing the audience that you’ve cultivated, more articles by other people.
Before you know it, there are five or six people writing about underwater basket weaving every day.
Is their content as good as yours? No.
Does Medium “care”? No. The knowledge of crowds will sort that quality issue out… Or it won’t, but it doesn’t really matter to Medium.
If you have one creator writing 10/10 quality stories every couple of days on a crowdsourced content platform, it’s probably better to have 20 creators publishing 6/10 quality stories every day, if you’re the platform owner.
When people are paying $5/mth for “all you can eat” content, it’s nice to sell a quality play, but most people are making a value decision when they buy.
Also, from Medium’s perspective, this de-risks you — if 7 of those 20 creators leave, so what? You’ll get more filling the vacuum soon enough and there is built-in content creation redundancy.
At this point, the creators have become the commodity.
Creators Are Contributing To This Situation
Yesterday morning, I woke up and opened Medium on my phone. In the “New From Your Network” section, there was a listicle from a creator about the “7 Things Needed To Start Your Own Small Business” or something like that.
This creator didn’t run a small business and probably never has. You could make the argument that being a Medium publisher/creator is “like” a small business, but it’s not really — you’re a freelancer at best, or as Michael said in his piece, you’re in the Gig Economy.
What this creator is doing is they’re churning out content as if they worked in a sausage factory. In fact, looking at this person’s profile, I noticed that they had published articles on about six or seven different topics in the past two days — all of it manufactured.
Go to Google, read five or six things that other people have written, compile it into a Medium post, pick a publication, assign some tags and push publish.
Move on to making the next sausage.
And other creators are encouraging this behaviour.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen people say in Facebook groups during the last month or so that I’ve been playing around on Medium, “To be successful, you need to be writing about a wide range of content topics.”
Even the most successful Medium creators are doing this now — “I’ve never had a threesome, but here are my ground rules for threesomes.”
This is how content battery hens in a writing farm behave.
You don’t need to be an expert on a topic to write about it, you just need to know a little bit more than the person reading your article.
When you drive down the quality bar in favour of output volume, you enter into a race to the bottom on ROI and commoditize yourself and other writers.
Breaking The Cycle
I’m new on Medium in terms of writing under the MPP program, so take this part with a grain of salt — it’s likely a poorly informed opinion based on tangential experience.
The way out of this is to break the cycle.
Indie publications need to stop publishing listicles.
Medium Curators need to stop curating manufactured content from “influencers” just because they have a big following.
Creators need to stop telling other new creators that the best way to “grow your Medium business” is to publish a high volume of content in a wide range of topics that they likely know very little or nothing about.
Medium in many respects is becoming something of an “article marketing platform” which is not a great direction. Nobody wants Medium to become like EzineArticles.
Medium itself is trying to elevate the quality by focusing more on its own publications. It’s a smart safety play for them — they can control exposure and distribution by recommending higher-quality pieces that they vet and select.
Inevitably, Medium will also start working more closely with bigger publications that have strong editorial standards. I’m new, but I’ve noticed that happening already — being curated with a big indie publication is very easy, getting curated in a small publication is pretty tough.
That will choke out the article marketing crowd eventually.
The downside? Well, as a Medium subscriber, I like to see a diversity of ideas and different takes on things. Medium’s own publications and their curation team are extremely one-dimensional with their perspective.
As a result, I find the content quality has eroded because the unique voices aren’t being amplified at all — you have the same people, saying the same things, over and over again. I have to go hunting for alternative points of view and that’s more work than I want to do sometimes.
But what’s Medium meant to do?
Their reaction is the only sensible one in my opinion. I think they could maybe hire more curators with different points of view and they could have a greater diversity of opinion in their own publications, but they need to focus on promoting quality writing because crowdsourced platforms tend to skew towards higher volume, less quality.
That’s the best circuit breaker that they have, and they’ve pulled it.
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