A short excerpt from a YouTube talk by Nir Eyal arguing that sustainable content builds long-term engagement by solving real problems and being guided by curiosity rather than chasing clicks or repurposing others' content. He warns that content calendars focused on topical/holiday posts feel boring and produce transient subscribers who unsubscribe shortly after.
Chapters
The stuff that gets shared and that earns subscribers is stuff that solves a problem. And to me, that's the only sustainable way to create content. Because, yes, you could go and say, okay, I'm going to create a content calendar and now we need the holiday post and then we need the Valentine's Day post. But it's boring. I don't know, it's so fricking boring to create that content. And I think audiences can tell when you're guided by curiosity versus when you're guided by clicks. And they're gonna reward you when you're guided by curiosity because they wanna be on that journey with you. They wanna know what you're going to discover as opposed to, well, here's this thing that's working for this other person. So I guess I'll repurpose it and maybe get some clicks from it. I don't think that leads to long term engagement. That's the kind of stuff that you get a subscriber, good for you. And then they unsubscribe a few weeks later.