The Content Problem

Striking writers and actors hint at the challenges artists face when trying to earn a living in the clickbait economy

When I first told colleagues of my plans for this newsletter, one suggested in an off-hand way, “See if you can figure out what’s going on with photography.” 

That half-joking question resonated because it does seem like something strange is occurring: the simultaneous ubiquity and devaluation of photography. It started with the digital revolution, hit its stride with the explosion of social media, and reached peak calamity with the rise of AI. So while business may be booming today, it feels like we might be starving tomorrow. The juxtaposition is disorienting.

Careers in the arts have always presented a fundamental challenge. We’re doing things that are fun, creative and interesting, so there’s enough competition to keep wages down. But there’s a huge difference between getting rich and earning a living wage. The latter may soon become unattainable as entities that once sustained professional creators go out of business and the survivors no longer spend their money on quality writing, photography and illustration, instead purchasing the Web 3.0 soylent green known collectively as content.

A useful word, content. Its crudity perfectly signals its inherent lack of value. Thanks to the commoditization of photography and every other art form, content is ubiquitous and cheap. Like corn and crude oil, it goes into everything and the people producing it fight for scraps while the suits make bank. A tale as old as time. 

But I’m not here to advocate eating the rich. I’m simply lobbying for an understanding that this algo-optimized race to the bottom will have broad cultural and economic impact, especially for workers in media and the arts.

Hollywood writers and actors are on strike because of changes to the way they are paid, because of changes to the business model. Spurred by the shift to streaming and compounded by the redirection of ad dollars to social media, funds that once trickled down to workers and provided them with a middle class income are instead being captured at the top. It’s the same in publishing and broadcasting and every creative industry. It’s supply and demand. And in the commoditized world of content, it means more work for less pay.

Content need not be produced to the high standards of traditional arts and media. In the content economy, quality takes a back seat to quantity. Why would anyone pay an expert to churn out low-level crap? Especially when there’s always someone more desperate to fill the content-generating role.

Once-great professions are being replaced by a horde of struggling content creators and influencers. Touted romantically as “the creator economy,” it’s actually just gig work in disguise. It may sound interesting and exciting to publish on Substack, YouTube and TikTok, or to hawk creative services on freelancer websites for five to fifty bucks a pop, but for the vast majority of millions of users, the economic benefit rounds to zero, putting sustained professional creativity effectively out of reach.

The term “content” is reductive and pejorative. What the industry today prefers (and tomorrow will demand) from photographers, writers, actors and artists is anti-quality, focused solely on quantity of output formed around keywords, trends and search optimization. It’s all clickbait designed only to serve The Algorithm. Drivel is now the content that is king. 

I wrote previously about the demise of a once-thriving photo publishing industry. I know firsthand that the type of writing and photography that was featured in those magazines—from many different authors, photographers and publishers for decades—dissolved in the blink of an eye when faced with the power of the search engine.¹ The content that replaced it is based almost entirely on product reviews and salacious human interest stories because they are full of timely keywords that garner the clicks that sell the ads. These content factories churn out the same clickbait as one another, in which the only meaningful difference is in the byline.

And this is just my personal experience in my own tiny corner of the internet. At the other end of the spectrum, Hollywood does the same with rehashed I.P. and comic book movies ad nauseam because they more efficiently (less riskily) maximize profits. And while I have nothing against comic book movies and Star Wars spinoffs, when they crowd out everything else artists have less room to thrive and our culture is poorer for it.²

Whatever you’re interested in, whatever you like to read or listen to or eat, it’s all going to become content that first serves The Algorithm. It will be delivered exclusively via TikTok and YouTube and future versions of the same. 

I have no issues with creative people doing great things in whatever venue gives them a voice. I take issue with the fact that lowest common denominator content is being funded by the advertising dollars that once kept the lights on for businesses that paid creators a living wage to do good work. Content is an invasive weed that crowds out truly creative endeavors. 

When advertisers no longer need magazines, they cease to need well written, well photographed and well designed editorial and advertising. Instead of paying a few professionals reasonable fees, advertisers pay hundreds of amateur content creators and influencers a pittance. In the end their spend may be the same but it’s allocated entirely differently—with the side effect of kneecapping the content creator’s ability to earn a living. 

And why shouldn’t businesses do it this way? They’re getting a better, more trackable result at every step of the way, and they’re going where the eyeballs are. What’s great for brands and advertisers is horrible for creators. See the problem? Creativity will always exist. Creativity for meaningful pay will not. 

“So what?” you say. “If it sells it must be good.” No. Good has been usurped by popular. Candy is popular. McDonald’s is popular. Logan Paul’s Prime energy drink is popular. None of these are healthy when consumed in quantity—much less as the only option for every meal. Popular content can also be creative, expressive and wonderful, of course. It can be great art for art’s sake, hilarious and sad and beautiful. But the business model that brings it to us no longer incentivizes it, so quality becomes an occasional side effect. 

The clickbait economy’s business model is the same one that encourages us to turn our cars into taxis, our free time into delivery driving and our houses into vacation rentals. Such crowdsourcing puts a few extra bucks in our pockets, while the executives with the private jets build rockets and submarines. 

“I wrote for a very big show called The Bear,” says TV writer Alex O’Keefe in the clip above. “I lived below the poverty line working on this show that has made millions of dollars for FX and Disney. This is not how the world has to be. There is enough wealth in this industry alone for us all to have success. And for 100 years in this industry, that’s how it worked. It was a common expectation this would be a good, union, middle class career. Not for the big actors but for everyone who makes the machine run. And now we are not even allowed to be in the middle class, we are told just to be grateful to be there.”  

Writers and actors are in a union, so they can go on strike. Who do photographers petition for fair pay? Our clients are magazines (dead), newspapers (dying³) and advertisers (who all left for TikTok). Soon enough, with the perfect storm of artificial intelligence, there’s even less need for paid humans to generate content. Computers are much better suited to this.

If the boss can get his movie written by AI and animated by a machine, he can certainly cut a lot of costs and push a lot of people into new careers. The Algorithm doesn’t care who made the content or if and how they got paid. It doesn’t even care if the content is any good. It only must optimize for clicks. Congratulations, we’ve turned every commercially viable creative endeavor into clickbait. 

The old way certainly cared about viewership and ad sales and clicks, but it didn’t care only about these things. Because of its top down, curatorial system, the idea was that if you made something good, and trusted tastemakers recommended it, people would buy it. But today there’s no need for trust, no need for human curation or quality control. Today’s arbiters of taste are the algorithms from Meta, Google and TikTok for which the right combination of keywords is enough to get the click. When quality doesn’t matter, why bother? Good stuff costs more, and you know how much they hate that. 

An industry that works to make things good hires professionals and pays them a living wage to spend the time and effort necessary to make the good thing. Once quality becomes irrelevant, expensive people who make good things can be eliminated. So that’s what we get. 

There once was a business model that enabled writers, actors, photographers and artists of all kinds to create quality work for a reasonable fee, but those structures are dead and dying. Instead of quality, the aim is now solely to get the clicks. Get the clicks at any cost, so long as it isn’t a living wage.

1. It wasn’t only the search engine. It was also powered by the monetized ad-based search result, as well as a calculated sales approach that Cory Doctorow exquisitely called the “enshittification” of social media. Read his piece here for further insight into how social media first hooked publishers on their reach, then held that reach hostage for payola-style revenue.

2. The top ten grossing films in 2022 were: a comic book sequel, a comic book second sequel, a comic book third sequel, an old I.P. reboot, a second sequel to an old I.P. reboot, a sequel in a series based on a video game, a fifth or so sequel in an animated series I seriously can’t be bothered to look up but I bet it’s probably actually the sixth or seventh sequel (it’s Minions, I’m talking about Minions), another goddamn batman movie and two movies from China I’ve never heard of. 

3. It’s estimated that by 2025 the United States will have lost fully one third of our newspapers, something north of 3,000 dailies. On February 26th of this year, The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register all ceased printing. I wonder if an uninformed electorate across Alabama, all getting its news from the same couple of national sources, could have lasting negative effects on our society? Only one way to find out!