Is the world of world of content marketing roaring towards a head-on collision with the law of supply-and-demand?
That’s the suggestion blogger Mark Schaefer made in a recent posting titled, Surviving ‘Content Shock’ and the Impending Content Marketing Collapse.
Schaefer’s thought is that there’s an exponentially larger amount of content on the web every year, but still only so many hours in a day for end users to consume it all.
That sets up conditions for a crash, or content shock, that will make competing in the content marketplace all but impossible for smaller players who are up against deep pocketed competition.
In Schaefer’s eyes, it’s a simple case of the supply-and-demand in action.
Schaefer backs up his content doomsday talk with plenty of examples but none is more relevant, or frightening, than his take on YouTube videos.
He points out that five years ago, the most popular YouTube videos these days are usually produced by big brands, not DIY-types. That’s same dynamic played out in the early days of television when locally produced programming was more common than network fare.
In the content crash scenario, competing with big brands and their big budgets will make the barrier-to-entry for small bloggers and affiliates simply too high and they’ll be completely squeezed out of the market.
So is content shock an extinction-level event for small casino affiliates? Not necessarily.
Schaefer is quick to point out that content shock is just that, a shock. He says that once the initial shock wave passes, content creators will adapt by innovating new content marketing techniques that help level the playing field.
In his follow-up posting titled, Six Arguments Against Content Shock, Schaefer says that businesses that have already established themselves in narrow niches have a good chance of surviving the content marketing crash. (So if you’re the top backgammon affiliate in the world, congratulations.)
Of course plenty of casino affiliates will probably tell you that the content shock scenario Schaefer describes has been happening in their industry for years.
They’ll also tell you that providing high quality content that provides value to players is the only way of competing against them.