Cole Schafer (5:03)
And in 2016, Inc magazine republished so many of my pieces that they just came to me directly and said, do you just want a column in our publication? And then I ended up writing for Inc. Magazine from 2016 to 2018. I think give or take in there. Why am I sharing this? Because every couple years the platforms change. Quora is now a dumpster fire. As much as I love that platform, I love that team. I'm grateful for the impact that it had. I would not recommend anyone write on Quora because it has changed so dramatically after Quora, from 2016 to 2020, Medium was incredible. Not only could you get really amazing distribution on Medium, but they also were starting to ramp up their paywall program. Their paywall program was when you would write a piece on Medium, you could choose, do I want this to be available to the public or do I want to put this behind the paywall and basically get paid a royalty based on viewership and engagement. So the same way that a music artist might get paid per stream on Spotify or Apple, that's what Medium was trying to build. And they raised a bunch of money to do it and they ramped up the program. And the thing that I figured out is that they didn't even care and they didn't have the infrastructure to check whether or not the same pieces were getting published behind the paywall. Meaning I took my entire library, my entire library from Quora and everything that I had written on Medium up to that point, and I took all the highest performing pieces and I just copy pasted them behind Medium's paywall. I got 10 times more viewership because I had an insane library to just keep leveraging. And because I was playing the hits and I was just posting bangers, I got paid on all of those. So from 2016 to 2020, I think I was probably making 100 grand a year just copy pasting all of my old articles to the point where Medium ended up emailing me saying, if you keep doing this, we will have to ban your account. We will have to take you off of the platform. Because I had figured out how to basically game their system again. Why am I sharing this? Because as time goes on in the world of digital writing, the platforms change, the rules of the game change, algorithms change, incentives change, formats change. And so my entire thesis from writing on the Internet for the past 15 years is that the whole goal is to build a library that you can reuse over and over and over and over and over again. It is inevitable a new platform will pop up tomorrow, a new platform will pop up next year, A new platform will pop up five years from now, ten years from now. It is inevitable that whatever platform you are currently using will change. You know, there was a point when Quora was my entire life. I haven't written on Quora in three years. And the same is true at some point for X, the same will be true for LinkedIn, the same will be true at some point for Instagram, etc. So the game is not really putting all your focus on how do I game the Algorithm. The game is on building a library so that when platforms change and when algorithms change, you can take advantage of it. Okay, so I'm giving that preface to share that right now we are going through another one of those periods. And this is always a really exciting thing for me to talk about because I've gotten very good at recognizing when these periods begin. And as soon as I notice that something has changed, I deploy resources in a very different way because I want to capitalize on that opportunity. And so my goal here is to share with all of you how I'm interpreting this, what I think is changing, and what you should do about it, especially into 2026. Like what, what are your opportunities for arbitrage? Because that's all organic content really is, is just arbitrage. It's like this platform is prioritizing this thing. Let me go capitalize on that and I get to arbitrage the opportunity. Okay, does that make sense? Fun topic, something everyone's interested in. If you have questions as we go along, drop them in the chat. But I do want to walk through sort of in detail, what I, what I see happening. Okay. So the first thing you need to understand I. This was like a big, a big insight for me. I don't have the book on my, on my desk here, but in my book, the Art and Business of Online Writing, something that I talk a lot about is that you have to pay and pay attention to the context of these different platforms. You have to, you have to realize that each of these, like, even though these are huge platforms, right, platforms with hundreds of millions or billions of users, you have to remember that they are still owned and operated by human beings. Okay, so these, these aren't like these amorphous, you know, containers. They are things that are built by other humans. And you also have to pay attention to where is the money. Like another easy example back in 2021, 2022, maybe a little earlier. 2021, I think substack raised a monster round. And when I saw them raise tens of millions of dollars from some of the most well known VC firms in the world, immediately I went, okay, they just raised enough. They just raised a war chest that could last the next decade. So what am I going to do? I'm going to follow the money. You just raised, all this capital, I think now is a good time to start posting on this platform. I am going to build a newsletter, a paid newsletter on Substack as soon as they launch substack notes in 2023 and they sent out their you know, news, their company newsletter and they were like, we are now prioritizing notes to make this a reader destination. Immediately I was like, follow the money. Okay, great. Let's start reposting all of our X content over on Substack. A very easy way of capitalizing on opportunities in the world of digital writing is just follow the money, follow the incentives. Okay, so if you go look at a platform like X, this is why I like staying on top of these things. I like continuing to educate myself. And if you don't want to, then that's great that you're here because I can just give you the, the summary notes. What was it six months ago? Four months ago, X hired this guy to basically take over as head of product. His name is Nikita. Bear drop in the chat. Anyone familiar with Nikita or has anyone been following his work on X? Okay, the thing that you need to know like this is like if you just pay attention, like the answer stares at you in the face, you know. So the thing that you need to know about Nikita, he's a serial entrepreneur and he basically has built an entire career around capitalizing on interesting trends, specifically like consumer short form types of content and platforms. And he has built a reputation for generating a lot of virality around the things that he does. So I don't know him, so I'm not saying this with judgment, but just from my observations, I don't think that he's someone that sits there and thinks that much about like how do I prioritize the highest quality content on X. Yes, they want quality because they want users engaged and they want users having a good time. But again, follow the incentives. Like if you're hired as head of product, what are your incentives? Your incentives are I want to make daily active users go up, I want to make screen time go up, I want to make engaging with other posts go up. And if you know anything about human nature, most people tend to default back into like what is the thing that requires the least amount of cognitive load? What's the thing that I don't have to think about? On top of that, Nikita has shared on X that he is aiming in a direction of how do you make X like TikTok for text and if you spent any time on TikTok, TikTok is very, it's very like short viral memey type of content focused. And then depending on what pocket you get into, you get served the occasional like long form video, like a two or three minute video about something that's really specific to your to Your interest. But for the most part, TikToks are like pretty short and it's like haha, it's like, oh, that's clever. Or like whoa, that's shocking. Right? Over the past couple months, as Nikita has taken over X, you can see that this is what's been changing in the X algorithm. I'm sure everyone here, if you spend any time on this platform, you probably have seen a lot more like very viral one liner, short form posts from like random people, random accounts, you know about the most random things. It's like, it's like one person like says a funny one liner about walking into KFC one afternoon or another person writes like a paragraph short story about like an overheard conversation in an elevator. Like really like obscure and sort of random and yet engaging things. As a result, your for your page is showing you a lot more of things that appeal to the masses. This is really important to understand because whenever you see algorithms doing things like this, you have to inherently ask yourself, like, our business is a great example. What is the sweet spot? How do you stay true to your industry and stay true to your niche while also taking advantage of new content formats and like playing the game, right? Like if the algorithm is clearly telling you these are the rules of the new game and you choose not to do any of them, then you shouldn't be surprised that the algorithm is rewarding other people other than you because the rules have changed. But you also don't want to completely over rotate where all you're doing is trying to write things that appeal to everyone and you abandon your niche, right? So that becomes the crux of the decision is how do you find the sweet spot? How do you stay true to the niche that you're writing about, especially when that niche is connected to a business like ours? Or you over rotate and you just try and write things that go viral but like, they have no purpose to you, right? Like I could write something that gets 10 million views, but if it's not aimed in the direction of writers, then like what's the point? Because our business is not dependent on traffic. Our business is dependent on a very specific type of traffic. Right? We want people who want to write to join our ecosystem. Okay, so yes. So how do we solve this? Like what do we actually do? Okay, so there's a couple of things that I want to, I want to point out because whenever I see stuff like this, I think the answer, or at least this is where what I've come to as the answer for myself, I think the answer is keep writing about the topics that you are, but change the format, change the packaging. So it's not abandon your niche, abandon the topic, abandon the industry. It's keep writing about the industry that you're writing about, but adapt it to new formats. As I talk about some of these new formats I want to, there's a big asterisk next to what I'm about to say, which is this is clearly a slightly more advanced topic. Okay, if you're still in a place of. You haven't really started writing consistently on the Internet yet, sure, all of this is interesting, you can do with it whatever you'd like. But the primary thing to solve for for you is not picking the perfect format. It is literally just hitting publish. So I want to, I want to be very clear, like what thing are you actually solving for? If you are consistently writing and hitting publish right now, then the next thing is you iterate on that consistency and you can do it better or differently. If you are not currently writing, then yeah, sure, like implement some of these things, but like realize that that's the second step. The first step is just consistently writing. And, and I'm going to show you why this is so important. Because again, the goal is not virality for the sake of virality. The goal is not even like views or impressions or any of those metrics. The goal is building a library. So when a platform changes, all you have to do is just copy, paste, copy, paste. Okay, so let's walk through a couple of these, test my new screen share here. Can everyone see that? Coming through. Okay. X recently rolled out a new feature called Articles. I believe it's a premium feature just so that everyone knows. And when you click on an article, it presents like this. It literally looks like a long form article. Okay? You can include like subheadings, you can include visuals, all sorts of stuff. I want to emphasize this might not seem like it's that big of a deal, but you have no idea how many years X was like. Like the only reason that threads became a thing were because people wanted to start writing long form content on X, but there was literally no way to do that. So users created a new format called Threads, where you would just reply to each tweet and you would just create a thread and that, that basically created like long form on X. Being able to post long form on a platform like this with as many users and as much distribution as it has is a huge deal. Okay, like X is 10 times bigger than Quora and Medium. And I was getting crazy distribution on those platforms back in the day. So, like, this is a big, big deal. All right? The fact that you can also do formatting things like have subheads, or you can, you know, they have a little quote feature there, or you can add images, right, like this. You can see where this is going to start to go. It's very similar. It is very similar to the way that TikTok functions, which is you have a lot of short form content, and then occasionally when you're really interested in something, you get served a longer form video, something that's like two or three minutes. I don't know if TikTok has a time limit. Actually, I want to say it's three minutes, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm not as familiar with that platform. And when you're really interested in something that serves you more of a long form, it has a longer time limit. That's. That's what I thought. Okay. I want everyone to pay attention to. I've gotten some feedback that the screen share isn't as sharp. So I don't know if you can see this. This article has 162 million views, and it was posted less than a week ago. 162 million views. That is insane. That is insane. I don't think I have. In all of my years of writing on the Internet, I don't think I have ever seen a single piece of content get that many impressions. Now, there's a couple things that I want to point out here about this one. Yes, this is Dan. Dan Ko is a very popular writer and has a huge audience. His audience is not the reason why this has 162 million impressions. And I can prove it with a very simple thing. Dan does not have 162 million followers. Okay? So it's important to internalize that. These social platforms are what I like to call a lottery game. They actually have very little to do with the size of your audience. If you go to your feed, your feed is 90% people that you do not follow. So it has almost nothing to do with how many followers you have. It has to do with the individual performance of any piece of content. Okay? So he does not have 162 million followers, which means that at some point, this piece took on a life of its own and the algorithm ran with it. Okay? This is not an outcome that he or anyone has any control over. This is he posted something and he woke up one day and he won the Powerball. Okay? So you have to remember that the only way to win in games like this is to keep playing. You don't have control over the outcome. You have no idea whether something is going to get a thousand views or 162 million views. The only thing you have control over is continuing to play the game. The second thing I want to point out, which is something I've been reflecting on a lot the past couple days, about Dan, specifically, Dan has been writing an article essentially every week or every couple days. And that article is his newsletter. And that newsletter is basically the script of the YouTube video that he records. So he's been doing that little workflow. You know, article republished, article that goes on his website also becomes the newsletter that he sends to his list also becomes the script of his YouTube video. He has been doing that little workflow every single week for five years now. I mean, he came up on Twitter the same time me and Dickie did back in 2020.