The Content Pyramid

good post, thanx! Content is the one and only unlimited currency in internet. So, start printing your own money 😉

Excellent stuff and food for thought. Generalisation never makes for a decent arguement though, I think you’ve got to try a bit of everything, and be mindful of your actual audience and platform (ie company blog or personal).

I remember trying to lay down ideas for my first post on Hobo in 2008. Two weeks it took me and almost everybody ignored it, and a post with a top ten list I did the same day got 12,000 visitors from Stumbleupon lol

It wasnt till exactly a year later the post I had hopes for got nominated for a Semmy and I had spent the year pumping out low level notes cause it got links 🙂

But your right, ideas is where its at – sometimes it just flies right over your audience though. Scarey though sometimes to put it all out there.

Some (like me) need to start from the bottom and hopefully work their way up lol 🙂

Good stuff. Maybe another post breaking down the top level? As a content producer (writer), I know there’s many different levels even at the top of your pyramid…

* Writers (>$0.10/word)
* Copywrtiers (>$0.03/word)
* Content Creators ($0.02/word)
* Content Contortionists – Native English Speakers typically ($0.015/word)
* Indians – Non-Native English Speakers (<= $0.01/word)

I agree with your basic pyramid, though.

Cheers,
kpaul

You probably need another dimension, marketing

Someone who is an originator who also does a good job marketing them retains the value can build large audiences.

There can be an art in aggregation that gives it added value such as linkbait list pieces.

That was real cool David. How do you come up with that? Basically, that is how exactly works. Very generic understanding of the internet business.

I really like this pyramid and your way of explaining it. I wish I could be an originator, but unfortunately, I think I fall into the middle section somewhere… I guess I’ll keep trying for that top section…

You’re right about Dave – 9 times out of ten he sets lightbulbs off above my head!

Thank you. Your like a pyramid.
There is food for thought

Very good! Thanks for this pyramid. It´s easy to understand for people without any seo-knowledge!

Greetings from germany!

Nice post about content. I feel the same way when I write my blog posts. Nothing is more painstaking than to see someone rip-off your content. I write blog posts that are anywhere between 1,500 -3,000 words per post, on home improvement. — It takes a lot of time and thought to write about such topics.

If I had to choose between which category to be placed in, I would say originator! Then give it a few weeks and your competitors will put a spin of regurgitated crap similar to my post.. Go figure..

Love this.

And sitting in the third level is Mashable and Guy Kawasaki… does this mean the lower in the pyramid, the more wide spread appeal there is?

Still the originators are the great contributors.

This states the obvious only to inflate egos.

Thank you for this visualization!

I think you can add a third dimension of Stickyness. Or maybe Loyalty of the reader is a better word?

Do the Originators or the Aggregators have the most loyal readers?

And sometimes when we rush, we make mistakes.
However it is good to know your weaknesses and learn how to remedy.

I’m definitely an originator.

It’s a problem for daily blogging. Not that the idea well runs dry, but the time and energy to execute get too easily sidetracked unless I am absolutely ruthless with my time. And that has a cost as well.

I don’t consider anyone “writing” recycled pap an originator though. There are no more “Top 10 Tips for SEO” that could possibly be written. Seriously, how many ways can you say the same thing? I won’t write articles like that.

Your pyramid is an excellent way to help content creators visualize where they are, and where they can go from here.

I like the fact that as a pyramid, it illustrates the pros and cons of each position. Originators are in the enviable position of being the thought leaders, but have less outreach until their content is picked up by the Commentariat.

Understanding this dynamic is a great step in developing a content strategy.

Nice Pyramid. Maybe another layer on the top. People who have good ideas but can’t write 🙂

Great information about different type of content that we are using. The way you have explained is totally unique. Content is the only major currency in internet world

Something doesn’t have value merely because someone originated it. That’s the Marxist labor theory of value, and it’s wrong. Your chart needs more dimensions or something.

Also there is value in aggregating and copying, especially if the person doing so is a good filter. I don’t see a lot of original content at Instapundit but that is not the role he chose.

I think the chart is naive. It’s almost Randian in its worship of originality.

Hi Brian. I don’t think you’re saying anything that disagrees with the nature of the chart… point me to the bit that says “aggregators have no value” – an idea I tried to take pains to make.

But if no-one originates, then no-one can aggregate – which is why I’d argue that the origination holds primacy in terms of value. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where wealth accrues – otherwise the man digging the sand would make more money than the man turning it into silicon.

The commentary says more than the diagram about the nuances. Is being Randian compatible with being a Marxist? Genuine question…

Your chart could be instructively used to discuss many old economic fallacies. For instance:

A) It makes the Marxian mistake of assuming people fall into distinct groups. In Marxism people are classified as either the proletarian or the Capitalists. Marx claims that sure capital adds to productivity and therefore deserves a share of output, but guess what, capital was also produced by the proletariat and stolen by the capitalists. Therefore, he thinks that capitalists do nothing. This makes two mistakes, firstly captialists can act as both workers and as capital investors. For example working as laborer when younger, saving capital, then living off the extra productivity caused by the capital later. Secondly, capitalist do “work”, as it takes effort to coordinate and plan how to use that capital.

Your chart makes similar mistakes. There is no separate classes of originators, commentariat, aggregators, and thieves. All actors can take on all these roles simultaneously. Plus one can innovate in commentary, aggregation, and thievery.

B) You make the Randian mistake of overvaluing origination. It’s quite possible for the most economic value to be added in other stages of economic production. In the FountainHead a fellow named Roarke destroys a building into which arguably had has contributed no value. He invested no capital, did no work, and only secretly contributed ideas, that were in fact NOT used in creating the building. His justification in destroying the building was that it only had value in his ideas. Which he felt he owned, and was upset that those ideas were twisted into something else. The story shows Rand’s obsession with origination, and overvaluation of it.

C) You make the mistake inherent in the joke about the different organs deciding who is the most important. The asshole wins the argument by shutting down in the joke an screwing up the entire bodily system, but any organ could do that. Sure without origination there would be no new value, but without dissemination there would be no delivery to those who value.

Added value and effort might be largest in the middle of the chart, because it might be more work to keep people interested, than to come up with isolated original ideas, among other reasons.

“Is being Randian compatible with being a Marxist? Genuine question…”

There is no reason one cannot make the mistakes of both in different areas. Mistakes often are quite compatible even when applied to the same area.

I don’t recall anything inherent in the diagram that precludes the possibility of people moving between different groups. You’re right that people can be both an originator and an aggregator at different points in time (or even simultaneously).

Nor does it deny that value can and is added at every point. But necessarily, the person who copies, say, a film from Bit Torrent and burns it to a DVD is not adding very much compared to the guy who wrote the script. It also follows that there are many more people with DVD writers than there are people with film studios, which is why the pyramidal shape holds roughly true in many circumstance.

If there’s no grain of truth in the schematic, I suggest trying to make the same amount of money from hooky DVDs of Avatar at car boot sales as James Cameron did the first day the cinema doors opened on the film.

Of course no generalised schematic of human activity can adequately cover all situations (again, I refer you to the commentary, where this point is made plain). What the diagram does encapsulate is an approach to content production that some people – presumably not you, because you’re too clever – will find useful in terms of understanding how they might bring their work to a wider audience.

You know… it’s just a rule of thumb.

I don’t think we’re disagreeing about anything really – other than the fact that you’ve bothered to read Marx and Rand, and I’d rather eat my left ball 🙂

Look the chart has explicit directional arrows of “Value & Effort” and “Volume and Ease”. The arrows are explicit claims of continuous increases in the directions they point. If not instead there would be some kind of histogram placed on the sides.

If the only thing on the diagram was the “Value & Effort” arrow then one would read it as “Value increases with effort”, which is a perfect description of Marx’s labor theory of value. Because that arrow is next to your classifications it implies that your categories are in ordered by an increase in “Value & Effort” from bottom to top. However as I have already pointed out the most value may be in the aggregation, or some other layer/category, while independently the most effort may also be some other category.

In other words you are making the claim that these four categories will have the same exact ordering by “increased effort, increased value[decreased ease being redundant] , and decreased volume. I don’t think that is the case. The most value is probably in commentaria or aggregation which would tend to be out of line with the other two. I would tend to agree that ease should correlate with volume.

“If there’s no grain of truth in the schematic, I suggest trying to make the same amount of money from hooky DVDs of Avatar at car boot sales as James Cameron did the first day the cinema doors opened on the film.”

Sorry to tell you this but the vast majority originators have a very hard time making money in the market. Many inventors have died poor and hungry because they could see their inventions through to market successes while the middlemen have made killings on the very same inventions by overcoming transaction costs that the inventors did not understand. No one is going to drive to drive to hoboken to buy some guys greatest mouse trap, however they will drive to the store a mile down the road to peruse all the latest gadgets aggregated into a low cost inventory.

Well we’re talking out of our hats here – you say the vast majority of inventors die penniless, I say you can find any number of originators sat atop a large pile of cash. Are both true? Probably. Like anything, unknowable factors like luck, the quality and benefit of an idea, technology and personality will always play a hand. Like I say, it’s a rule of thumb.

But you say: “No one is going to drive to hoboken to buy some guys greatest mouse trap, however they will drive to the store a mile down the road to peruse all the latest gadgets aggregated into a low cost inventory.”

No one?

We can unfairly traduce your argument (and – hey, what is the internet for if we can’t do that?) by distilling it to… Steve Jobs vs. a supermarket shelf stacker.

Now it may be true that Terry Leahy is wealthier than Steve Jobs but he’s just the guy at the top of Tesco’s internal pyramid. He originates the strategy and collects the big bucks from the workers in his pyramid as a result (the division of labour and all that).

Philo Farnsworth doesn’t disprove the point. He just highlights that having the idea isn’t enough of itself.

I suppose we’re getting into religious arguments here but there is a side question about whether “value” equates to “money” as easily as you evidently think it does. Van Gogh died penniless but… I think the continual elision of material wealth with notions of value is one of the things that has distorted our societies for many years.

Money is one measure of value, there was no implication in my post that it was the only. It was only an example to show you that things don’t work the way you think. Nor was I imagining all these inventors originating extremely valuable ideas but not profiting. Most inventions are crap. Origination in and of itself isn’t value.

Market selection processes are important to generating the value, and yes a decision by a gallery or museum to buy and show a Van Gogh, may generate more value than what the original painter ever could.

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The Content Pyramid

The Originators

The Commentariat

The Aggregators

The Thieves

Where do you sit?

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