Anyone can be a content creator nowadays, whether YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook… Bar of entry is pretty low as technology is widely accessible. So in those regards it’s a tasty opportunity to grab onto.
This doesn’t mean there’s going to be a ginormous audience waiting just for you to enter the battlefield of attention. If you have low public relevance and no branding recognition the beginning of content creation will be unsatisfying, hard and uneventful, especially with original content.
What does that mean? You’d have to work harder than everyone else, longer and smarter. It’d have to be a hard grind of trying out new things, ideas and failing most of the time. Consistency is key and it can take years on top of years to build the experience that can push you ahead.
Does any of that sound exciting? Nope, sounds like the struggles of entrepreneurship. Yea, it’s fancy to say anyone can be an entrepreneur nowadays, but it’s far from the truth, because it takes a lot of time, a lot of failure and a lot of money to allow you to spend that time at your venture. This activates stress, fear for the future and instability.
It’s not really up to the Creator how well their work performs. It’s either you’re a good cookie or a bad cookie to the Algorithm. Sometimes you’ll get scraps, sometimes you’ll get a larger piece, usually after the bigger piece: you’re thrown the small scraps again. The platforms target specific Creators who always get the traffic.
Sometimes it offloads traffic to random Creators. That’s why there’s this phenomenon where old content blows up randomly after 1-5 years. Obviously it’s based on user interests how the traffic gets routed, but at the end of it all you’re just playing the lottery, because even the best well-crafted plan can end up in total disappointment.
Overall it spells out a big NO if you want it to replace your normal job, or push you away from the path of getting a normal job. Why wouldn’t you want to go work x hours a day for x days a week and get x amount of money for your time and efforts? With content creation you’d have to work every day in order to get anywhere, and the money you’d get is insignificant to even pay for your water bill, assuming you even meet the quotas of Monetization.
Imagine getting 1000 views. If each of them was viewed with ads on (yea, good luck) then you’d probably get $0.30-$0.70 cents depending on the value of your content. It can go to $1 or even $6 per 1k, but that would entail advertisers targeting you specifically as a lucrative niche.
Now if you just want to do it because you enjoy the process, because you want to share value with the world or because you want to share your thoughts and beliefs, then go ahead and think no further. Totally, ultimately recommended.
But if you’d do it to get relevance and make it financially viable, while thinking you’ll skip the road of pain and suffering, then don’t kid yourself and don’t buy that shovel so many are trying to sell to you.
Create for fun and personal enjoyment, otherwise you’ll always be chasing the trend and you’ll never find satisfaction, because it’s a carrot on a stick.
