Selling Out vs. Just Selling: The Weirdness of "Content" Monetization

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what feels like a generational divide regarding how creators of works relate to their creations. It’s not uniform, of course, but there seems to have been a shift in how we talk about, and so contextualize and approach, the act of “being a creator.” It’s a story of technological change, too. Medium influences message obviously, but that’s not all of it. And it’s all centered on the evolving ontological characteristics of “content.”

I mean “content” here in a genericized sense, because its genericization is critical to understanding this odd world in which we find ourselves. Roughly put, “content” is a placeholder for “the things artists, writers, influencers, thought leaders, and so on create.” But it’s a placeholder that has come to usurp that which it holds the place of. The signifier has taken over the sign. We can think of it as if, over time, we stopped viewing pronouns as ways to conveniently point to each of the diverse and more significant proper nouns they might point to, and instead thought in terms of a generic and general “him” or “her” or “them.”

Content isn’t everything, though, and everything isn’t content. Creators might make sculptures, or bespoke shoes, or carved cabinets. But sculptures, bespoke shoes, and carved cabinets aren’t “content.” The term of art among the trendsetters for the creators of these artifacts is more likely to be “builder” than “creator.” 

Two Kinds of Creations

There’s a distinction in philosophy of art that clarifies here. Among artworks, there are those that are “allographic” and those that are “autographic.” The latter are the sculptures and bespoke shoes: The work of art is what the artist held in her hand and shaped or stitched. It is art about which we can coherently speak of forgeries. A perfect copy of a bespoke shoe isn’t the same as the original. It’s just a copy, even if “perfect.” Allographic art, on the other hand, is art where every copy really is the original. If I publish a novel, we don’t talk about there being an “original” and each paperback copy as a mere copy. Rather, each paperback you buy of my novel is the novel. The same holds for recorded music, movies on film or digital, and so on. There might be one-off variants we attach particular weight to (signed first editions, first pressings, and so on), but we don’t attach weight to them because they are somehow more authentically the novel or the song than the third printing or the high def MP3 download. Rather, they are a particularly valued variant of that basic artwork.

With that distinction in mind, we can perhaps talk about “content” of the sort at issue here as “the stuff you might make that’s allographic.” It’s YouTube or TikTok videos. It’s blog posts. It’s newsletter posts. It’s podcast episodes. In common usage today, a “content creator” is a person who makes those sorts of things. This doesn’t mean content creators aren’t or can’t be artists, because, as noted, allographic art is still art. But it also doesn’t mean that all content creators are artists, because plenty of creations we’d categorize as allographic (such as blog posts, explainer videos, and podcast interviews) aren’t really “art” as most of us understand it. (Of course, the definition of “art” is much more thorny and complex than most of us think. Fortunately, we don’t need to even think about its complexities for our purposes here.)

There’s more going on, though, because for as long as we’ve had technologies of reproduction, there have been content creators creating and selling allographic content. That’s not new, and so not representative of a cultural shift. Instead, this shift is about how content creators think both about their content—or at least how they publicly talk about their content—and the relationship between it and the act of selling. And that shift resulted from the interaction of two roughly simultaneous trends, the first towards becoming a solo entrepreneur salesman as the culturally privileged aspiration among young people, and the second towards everyone wanting—and wanting to sell—a personal brand.

On Being a Salesman

If there’s a cultural inflection point in the rise of this new relationship between content creators and their content, it’s the publication, and runaway success, of Timothy Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek. This was the book that convinced a lot of white collar and knowledge workers—and aspiring white collar and knowledge workers—that the path to easy riches was via the one-man sales operation. He taught the gospel of drop-shipping, where you’d set up a website that was little more than a thin front for someone else’s shipping business, get people to visit the website and buy, and then skim a cut of the resulting sales. You didn’t need to actually handle any product yourself, because your business was taking orders and then passing them along, with payment, to someone else who would box them up and put them in the mail to your (and their) customer.

Of course, drop-shipping wasn’t new. And, of course, being a salesman wasn’t new. Amway and Tupperware parties were precursors to the drop-shipping grind bro. In fact, the main innovation Feriss brought was to pitch as masculine an age-old get rich quick scheme that had historically been viewed as feminine, which he accomplished by replacing collectivist sales parties and friend-pestering as the primary marketing mechanism with the rugged individualism of solo building a website or mailing list.

But what was new, or at least the cutting edge representation of emerging trends, was telling college educated people that their old plan of “rise to the top of a large organization” to get wealthy wasn’t as sure-fire or undemanding of their time as “get people to buy stuff from your independent sales operation.” Suddenly everyone wanted to be a solo entrepreneur.

Becoming a “content creator” today is just a new form of this. If you get very big, you might have some helpers, like a producer for your show, but the core idea is that it’s you doing the selling as an independent, not you being part of a larger organization that sells stuff. The other half of the “content creator” model, though, is all about what you sell.

The Rise of the Personal Brand

The intersecting trend is the rise of the “personal brand.” Whereas with old-school drop shipping, the answer to the question “What am I going to sell?” was “This other company’s generic supplements,” the personal brand shifted the answer to “Me.” It’s no longer enough to be a solo entrepreneur. The aim now is to be famous while doing it. Your company doesn’t have customers, but now you have an audience. And this has shifted the emphasis in the operation from having a product, and then getting people to find it, to being the product, such that people want to buy whatever is associated with it.

Again, in broad strokes this isn’t new. We’ve had famous people selling their brand for, well, ever. The oldest form might be the spiritual guru, the guy who claims to have unique metaphysical insights or a spiritual connection with what matters, and then talks followers into following and supporting him on the promise that proximity to him (to his personal brand) will lead to their own spiritual awakening and success. And the old guru model actually speaks, better than more contemporary parallels, to this contemporary “salesman of personal brand” because the indicator of being on the path to success is the same: counting your followers.

Everyone who sells anything can measure success by counting how many things he’s sold. And if the number sold each week or month is going up, that’s a sign things are working. But if what you’re selling is a brand, the only way to sell anything in the first place is to achieve some success in establishing that brand. The trouble is, “brand awareness” is a lot harder to measure or watch incrementally grow than counting units sold.

The guru could do it, because he could see that yesterday he had three followers and today he has four and so, even if none of them are contributing anything to his financial wellbeing, the number’s going up. If it keeps going up, he’ll get enough who do support him to be a success. Likewise social media. To make a living as a “personal brand,” you need thousands or hundreds of thousands or probably millions of followers. If today you have only ten, you’re earning nothing, and won’t be for a while. But what you can see is that yesterday you had eight. And you can see that a week later you have a hundred, and so not only are you gaining followers, but the rate of gain is accelerating.

In a world before such easy quantification of growing brand awareness, lots of people would give up pretty early on. They’re not now a success, and the signs that success might come are opaque. In the world of social media, though, there’s a number that, even if it’s not going up quickly, is going up. So you stay on the treadmill.

Especially because it’s so cheap to do so. Becoming an “influencer” doesn’t demand much in the way of upfront costs. You already have a phone, which already has a decent enough camera. Platforms make distribution costless, and tools exist so anyone can cut a short form video. This isn’t feature filmmaking, and it isn’t years spent writing a novel and then trying to find a publisher to sink a bunch of resources into manufacturing and distributing it. This is dancing into your phone to a song you got, along with every song in existence, for a few bucks a month on Spotify—if you didn’t just grab it for free on YouTube.

AI tools drive the costs even lower, both in dollars spent and in time needed. Want to start a newsletter about how emerging technologies will impact project management, but lack expertise in either topic? Get a robot to draft something for you. 

The Backwards Funnel

Thus the current spot we’re in: People want to be solo entrepreneurs, and what they want to solo sell is their personal brand, and the way they sell their personal brand is by monetizing “content” associated with that brand.

But notice that this is backwards from the way creators have typically approached making a living with their creations. A writer becomes a writer because she wants to write. She has something she wants to say, and she hones her craft in saying it. Hopefully, other people want to hear it too, and if they do, then they buy it and her brand grows around being the person who said those things. In other words, the personal brand is downstream of the content.

Even in instances where it looks like more directly selling the brand, such as a famous person having a memoir ghost written for him, the brand likely grew around some area of expertise. This person is very good at acting, so became famous, and now people want to read his life story. This person is very good at business, and so established a brand around being good at business, and now people want to buy his thoughts on how they, too, can be good at business.

“Content creators” flip the script. They want to be the kind of person who is rich and famous for “creating content,” so they start by trying to create a brand by gaining followers for themselves, and the way they go about that is figuring out what “content” will attract followers.

This means expertise comes, if it comes at all, after brand. This is why so many content creators are in the business of branding themselves as content creators and then selling content about how to be a content creator. They’re building their brand around what interests them, which isn’t the content of the content, but rather how to sell a genericized “content.”

There’s Nothing Wrong With Selling

It’s important to distinguish this critique from a critique of selling your creations. Artists have always done the latter. Artists aspire to be working artists. Novelists want to sell books, musicians want to sell songs or tickets to their shows. But this is a critique, or at least a highlighting, of a different way of thinking about that whole business.

I was a teenager in the 1990s. The culture then was pretty clear that among the worst things you could do was “selling out.” We all had experienced the trauma of knowing an artist before they sold out, and then suffering the disappointment of seeing them sell out.

This wasn’t about getting big. You could have a platinum album without selling out. Instead, it was about giving up on creating the kind of content that had been meaningful to you and replacing it with the kind of content you thought would sell. It’s Weezer after the flop of Pinkerton. 

But kids don’t worry about selling out anymore. In fact, grind mindset culture and influencer culture and hustle bro culture all elevate selling out to the thing aimed at. If you can sell out, then you’ve succeeded. Failure is the inability to find an avenue to selling out. You don’t start with something to say and then figure out how to sell it, but instead start with a desire to sell and then figure out what to say.

The Supremacy of “Content”

Of course, plenty of people making a living by selling or monetizing their content on the internet don’t fit this “personal brand first and genericized content” model. Lots of artists make meaningful allographic art.

But there has been a recognizable shift in how willing people are to shamelessly embrace the “personal brand first and genericized content” model. How willing they are to sell it openly as what you should aim at. It’s why so many creators are unapologetic about creating AI slop and why so many tech firms market their products as helping creators do that.

And maybe the rise of AI slop is the way out of this. Maybe as content channels flood with bland content made by people whose interest is selling something instead of saying something, we’ll develop a counter-revolutionary force of people who demand meaningful content before they’ll follow a brand. That still exists, too, of course. We just need to treat it more fully as what to aspire to.