AI is Breaking the Economics of Content
AI is transforming content creation, with nearly 60% of producers using it to automate tasks, and generate captions, and virtual influencer content without compromising quality.
AI is Breaking the Economics of Content
Current surveys show that almost 60% of producers rely on AI to simplify mundane work like follower interaction, content aggregation, video editing, and post scheduling. These efficiencies free producers up to create unique, original content instead of administrative or repetitive tasks.
Creators leverage AI-powered tools to generate captions, thumbnails, and even entire scripts, speeding up the production pipeline without sacrificing quality. Virtual influencers and AI-generated personas have also emerged, delivering lifelike content in multiple languages and operating around the clock without burnout.
Agencies such as Torres Digital Marketing Chicago leverage AI technology to streamline influencer campaign processes and content creation, achieving greater engagement and wider reach. Such hybrid human-AI collaborations are at the forefront of creator economy trends.
The creator economy's future is in collaboration between Artificial Intelligence and human creators, with creators holding control over their content and audience relationships. Creator-owned platforms and direct-to-fan models increase as alternatives to algorithm-based social media, offering increased autonomy.
Frame: Evergreen Vs. Additive Content
For marketers around the world, evergreen content is the type of copy you dream of hitting “publish” on. It’s key for building and maintaining organic rankings. Hence, you remain visible in search result pages, attracting high-quality links from other sites, and even garnering attention from AI-powered search tools like AI Overviews.
Evergreen content is a cornerstone of SEO and brand strategy.
Wikipedia is an evergreen site, even though it's a user-generated content (UGC) platform, such as Reddit or YouTube, where its primary purpose is to serve comprehensive definitions on established topics.
AI destroys the value of one while raising it for the other.
Problem: AI makes Answering Questions Less Valuable
GenAI models are overflowing with answers to our questions, but if you’ve ever asked an LLM questions about a subject you’re very familiar with, you’ll soon notice an important distinction between answers (as in, AI-generated output in response to a question) and knowledge.
AI-generated answers don’t always meet developers’ need for trustworthy, validated knowledge. On the whole, developer trust in AI tools is not robust.
Over-relying on AI tools instead of investing in a system to capture, preserve, and share knowledge leads to a vicious cycle.
AI tools can deliver major productivity gains, among other benefits, but they are no substitute for a knowledge management strategy that effectively utilizes AI while keeping humans in the loop to ensure high-quality output.
Scale: AI Overviews Close to 50%
Almost 50% of Wikipedia’s queries display a large AIO at the top of the search results. That is no outlier: Reddit is at 46% and YouTube is at 38%.
A new study shows that Google’s AI Overviews appear in nearly half of all search results and take up to 48% of mobile screen space.
Wikipedia sees 7x more AI overviews for its keywords in the search results, while 1/3 fewer citations as the source.
Conducted by Botify and DemandSphere, the research analyzed over 120,000 keywords across 22 websites.
The study, conducted between August and September, finds that traditional SEO metrics like click-through rates may no longer give a complete picture of search performance.
When AI Overviews show up with featured snippets, which happens 60% of the time. These can occupy up to 76% of mobile screens, pushing regular listings out of view.
While strong organic rankings remain crucial, with 75% of AI Overview mentions coming from top-12 ranked pages, businesses need to adapt their strategies to the rise of AI in search.
Shift: AI Rewards Additive Content
Video is replacing text as Google’s primary source for answers.
YouTube’s citation rate jumped from 37% to 54% (up 17 percentage points) at the same time as Wikipedia dropped from 58% to 42% (down 16 percentage points).
The AI Reward System stands for a computerized approach, which is applied in machine learning specifically for reinforcement learning. Artificial intelligence algorithms are trained to make decisions by providing them with rewards/punishments for their actions.
The Economies of Content
Economics is a useful framework for content marketing because, as a business investment, ROI is always top of mind.
The cost of creating content comes down to three things:
- The level of difficulty to produce the content
- The level of content competition
- Your website authority
Pre-AI, the economics of evergreen content were net-positive because it attracted clicks from Google, some of which converted into customers.
LLMs like ChatGPT, AI Overviews, or AI Mode are not incentivized to send out traffic but to give the best answer, which makes the experience more similar to TikTok than Search.
Over the last 12 months, sites offering additive UGC have gained LLM visibility :
- Reddit.
- LinkedIn.
- Youtube.
- Quora.
- Etc.
Shift From Evergreen to Additive Content
The shifting emphasis from evergreen topics to net-new insights:
- Investment in additive content: data stories, research, customer success stories, thought leadership, etc.
- Lowering investment in evergreen content, favouring additive content
- Keeping evergreen content
- Creating evergreen content, emphasizing hyperlong-tail topics that align with your audience personas
