The Content Creation Paradox

If you’ve ever been involved in creating content for a consuming audience, and you’ve been doing it for some time, you’ve probably come up against the following conundrum:

“My content is getting stale, but I’m afraid that if I shake it up too much I will lose my audience”.

I see this with many YouTubers all the time, and I’ve even experienced it myself both on YouTube and on my blog.

You see, there’s kind of a paradox when it comes to creating regular content:

If you keep making the same kind of content over and over it will get stale and your audience will leave. However, if you change it too much, your audience will feel like your content is no longer “for them”, and will also leave.

It’s a sort of dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t kind of thing.

This doesn’t just apply to YouTube and individual creators, it applies to big productions such as tv shows and movie franchises too.

Think about it. Most TV shows can only last for so long. If they never shake things up and just repeat the same formulae they go stale, people stop watching and get cancelled. But if they shake things up too much, the audience feels that their favourite show has been “betrayed” by its creators, they stop watching and the show gets cancelled.

The most successful and long-running TV shows thread a fine balance between the two. They are usually procedurals, and most likely cop shows or medical dramas. These get around the paradox by keeping broadly the same formulae but having a high cast turnover. The same goes for soap operas. The cast and stories change, but the overall style and formulae stay the same. Any fundamental change is done slowly and over multiple seasons.

On YouTube, if you look at the most successful long-running channels, they too have changed over time, but almost never suddenly or explicitly. Some of this is through organic growth as those channels grow over time. They might get a new studio, or get new gear that allows them to create bigger and better content. Smaller channels that try to change too much, or suddenly announce that they are going in a new direction, quite often revert a few weeks later when they realise that their viewership suddenly drops off.

Of course on YouTube, there is the additional and significant problem of the algorithm gumming up the works. With the company constantly changing how they show and promote content, channels often have to respond to this and that in and of itself can stir change. Sometimes this helps, and other times it can kill a channel.

On my own photography blog, I’ve been coming up against the paradox recently too. I’ve been writing a photography blog for many years now, and at first, it grew slowly, then it started to really take off and it hit its peak a few years ago. It’s now in decline with viewers, and while this is due to many reasons, part of it, I’m certain is that it’s getting stale and needs a shakeup. On the other hand, my audience expects certain things so I can’t shake it up too much too quickly.

This isn’t just about content creation either. This same phenomenon crops up in all fields. People often complain that an app or service has changed too much and “why can’t they leave it alone?” But if it is “left alone” it will become stale and people will start looking for other alternatives. Once again, it’s a fine balance between doing too much and not doing enough.

Obviously, I’m oversimplifying a lot of this and the reality is much more complex. Creators face a broad range of obstacles when it comes to creating content long term, and this is just one of them. At the end of the day, you have to evolve and keep evolving. If you don’t you will probably just fade out as a creator. You have to take risks, but in order to do so, it’s important to know what the risks and the stakes are. The trick is to find the fine line and balance between putting your audience off and having them grow with you.

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