Content: Hiding Behind The C-Word

Here at the Ketel One Conference Center on the campus of The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, we're not through ranting about "content." No sir.

There are certain words that make our skin crawl and our brains explode. And "content" is one of them.

"Content" is a meaningless term -- a media contrivance -- invented by bullshit artists to add gravitas and mystery to mundane marketing activities.

It is a phony "discipline" which clever people are monetizing.

It is mostly just the same old web stuff, re-branded.

"Content" is a word that helps web promoters hide what they are doing. They do not say they are creating a newsletter, or a recipe, or an e-mail, or an essay, or a web site, or a game -- they say they are creating "content." It's so much more enchanting (and saleable.)

Posting an online recipe may be useful to a food marketer, but calling it "content" is just pretentious drivel. It's a fucking recipe, okay?

The idea that "content" as a concept is an important marketing discipline is absurd.

An old pizza crust is garbage. But an uploaded picture of an old pizza crust is "content."

By invoking the c-word they are doing what marketing people do best -- avoiding the specific and hiding behind jargon.

According to the most recent data I could find,  Google says that as of July of last year, there were 38 trillion pages on the web. Every page is "content."

And each page may have several individual items of content. For example, on your Facebook page every update is new content. So is every little ad. So is every comment and every photo.

How much total "content" is there on the web? Who the hell knows? But for the sake of simplicity, let's just stick with Google's 38 trillion number.

Now let's go to the blackboard.

If a person were to do nothing her entire life -- no eating, no sleeping, no getting high -- but surf the web for "content" in 1 minute increments, it will take her, on average, 72 million years to get around to your page of "content."

If your content is below average...gosh, it could take a long time.