🔴 How liquid is your content capital?

No guest today. It seemed a disservice to throw someone into the email chum bucket that is Black Friday.

Instead I wrote about a few ideas I’ve been marinating on — whether or not “creator” is a real job, if individual TikToks have real staying power, whether or not, as Elon says, “you are the media,” and a concept I only came across this week: content capital.

I had fun with this one. If you read it through, please do reply and let me know what you thought! You can also comment on the post (see the comment icon at the top of this email, or, if you’re reading this online, just scroll to the bottom).

Have a lovely weekend : )

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast, but there’s no new episode this week. Catch up on recent episodes here (and on YouTube).

Have you ever burned a newspaper? I grew up in a wood-fire-heated house, and one of my chores was to make the fire. I’d rip pages of the old dailies in half, crumpling them up and piling on the kindling.

Newsprint burns well, and the local daily was cheap. It’s not meant to last. The reason I’m thinking about burning newspapers is this tweet that’s been making the rounds:

As I write this, the tweet has 4.4k quote-tweets and retweets, many of the former featuring videos of old TikToks, disputing Skallas’ point. It’s clear that for the individuals responding with old TikToks, the one they chose does hold lasting meaning for them and has likely become ingrained in social groups’ colloquial culture.

Re-encountering some of these TikToks feels like re-encountering articles I’ve read in old newspapers, select pieces that hadn’t crossed my mind since I first experienced them but, for one reason or another, were interesting enough to gain purchase in my memory.

Scrolling, consuming all these videos, each one becomes functionally crumpled after I consume it. Firestarter. But the accumulated piles don’t heat my home; scroll consumption simply burns the minutes of my life, providing me with fleeting entertainment while converting the heat to two forms of capital, neither of which flow to me:

• Content capital: The creator of the videos gains viewcounts, likes, and follows

• Financial capital: The advertisers whose spending keeps the content free gain customers, and the platform where it all takes place receives those ad dollars (while maintaining a healthy daily active user count, contributing to the more abstracted company valuation)

I’ve just read Content, a short book by Kate Eichorn, a media historian and theorist, published as part of The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.

There’s not really a one-size-fits-all answer to what content really is. The closest to a punchy definition Eichorn gets is “everything that circulates digitally”.

She also makes a point that digital content isn’t best categorized by genre, medium, or format as it is by purpose. The categories she uses are content marketing, publishing content, educational content, and entertainment content. In other words, content should be categorized primarily by the creator’s intent.

But a creator’s intent — not just on TikTok, but on any feed-based, short-form platform — is always subsumed by the platform’s own motives; the primary purpose of any TikTok is to generate ad revenue and sustain daily active user count for TikTok.

Let me take you on a trip to Richard Scarry’s Busytown. Scarry was a children’s book author known for his practical illustrations of little animals participating in everyday municipal life.

In the internet's collective mind, the lasting image trait of Scarry’s work is its labeled depictions of jobs like letter carrier, firefighter, grocer, and farmer.

There’s a meme that if your job isn’t depicted somewhere in Scarry’s oeuvre, it isn’t a real job, the implication being that you don’t produce anything of real value or contribute to society. Here’s one of many examples from Twitter:

Scarry passed away on April 30, 1994 — exactly one year after the World Wide Web went into the public domain. There were fewer than a few thousand websites online when he passed. Mark Zuckerberg was 9 years old. YouTube, the platform that birthed the word “creator,” as we use it here, would not launch for another 11 years.

Is “creator” a real job? Were Scarry alive today, would he have illustrated it? It does contain multiple jobs that, though they might not all appear in Scarry’s 20th-century vision of society, certainly are real jobs.

These jobs include writer, filmmaker, photographer, artist, salesperson, businessperson, and advertiser.

It’s difficult to think of a profession we haven’t seen refracted through the creator lens. That lens functions to collapse the separation between jobs. To Eichorn’s list of “cultural workers,” we might also include chef, builder, nurse, athlete — on and on and on. Any type of professional is subsumed into creatordom.

For my money, the most illuminating idea in Eichorn’s book is the term “content capital”.

Content capital, in other words, is your reach. The size of your following, the engagement rate on your average post. The identities of your following and how much data you possess illuminating them. More importantly, your ability to wield content for material gain.

Skallas’ TikTok hot-take is that no given TikTok contains significant cultural capital. He’s essentially correct. Some TikToks may prove to cast a long, lasting shadow on global culture, but it’s more about the creators themselves; a newspaper is not significant for any given edition but for the publication as a whole.

One viral video does not necessarily generate content capital for its creator. Consider @joolieannie on TikTok, the creator whose work brought “demure” from dusty dictionary pages to the tip of the internet’s tongue back in August. At the time of posting, she had just under 1 million followers. Her following had remained basically static for at least the previous year. Within two weeks of that viral “demure” video, her following passed 2 million.

Any given TikTok is a burnt newspaper; one piece of content never represents content capital. It can only be a lever in building content capital for the creator. But that content capital is illiquid as long as the creator’s following is isolated to TikTok or any other corporate social media platform.

The closest analog to a short-form, feed-based platform “creator” as a unique job in Scarry’s Busytown is a farmer. More specifically, it’s a sharecropper. TikTok splits 50% of ad revenue with creators who have at least 100,000 followers. Sharecroppers did not own the land they worked; the farmer provided the land and often housing and equipment, often collecting 50% of the farmer’s crop in lieu of rent.

A creator on a short-form, feed-based platform is farming ad revenue for the platform and may receive 50% of associated ad revenue and additional business opportunities (from influencer deals to speaking gigs). But in terms of content capital, they only receive store credit. Their distribution is not their own.

Any creator not working to diversify their content capital cross-platform is doing themselves a disservice. The best way to do this — the gold bullion of content capital — is an email list.

One final note on sharecropping. It’s been almost entirely phased out in the United States for a number of reasons, one being the industrialization and mechanization of agriculture; it became more economical for large landowners to use less human labor and more mechanized labor.

Just a few weeks ago, during Meta’s third-quarter earnings call, as reported by Fortune, Mark Zuckerberg said this:

The night of the 2024 United States presidential election, Elon Musk tweeted, “You are the media now”. Tens of thousands of words and surely a ridiculous number of podcast hours have already been spilled on this, but for our purposes, let’s situate his position in terms of content capital. Elon has far more of it than almost anyone in the world. At 206.2 million followers, he is the most-followed Twitter user; the second most-followed is Barrack Obama at 131.1 million.

He also owns the platform and has more financial capital than anyone in the world.

Without getting too deep in the weeds, Elon is basically saying that control of and the ability to contribute to public narratives has shifted from traditional media (i.e., broadcasters, newspapers, and the people they employ) to everyone else; creators, especially on X.

He’s not wrong. Neither is he precisely right. He is certainly the media. And any given X user with high content capital is “the media” to an extent. But that content capital isn’t necessarily theirs; it’s his.

This past Monday, Elon’s X (formerly Twitter) filed an objection against The Onion’s buying InfoWars. 404 Media reported on this, pulling out a crucial detail:

In other words, if you have a great deal of content capital, but it’s all on Twitter — you have 100,000 Twitter followers but no following elsewhere — you do have content capital, but your liquidity is zero. X owns your content capital. “X calls itself “the sole owner” of X accounts,” Jason Koebler writes for 404.

Elon’s X owns the newspaper. Any given poster is just a gig-worker columnist.

It’s the same with Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn — any social media platform. Their exact terms of use vary but largely function to the same end: corporate ownership, not user ownership. Koebler ends the article making a case for Blue Sky and Mastodon, these decentralized social media networks where users do own their audience and content capital.

There’s nothing wrong with producing content for ephemeral purposes. It is simply dangerous to not be actively working to consolidate that capital in a truly owned form — like on decentralized social media platforms and email-list .CSV files you can put on a hard drive, not on some data warehouse server.

Newspapers burn; produce them, but work to own your own publishing press and paper route. No fire can destroy gold bullion.

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we're talking worker-owned media with people from three of our favorite worker-owned publications — Defector, Hell Gate, and 404 Media. They're very transparent about what it takes to run a modern, subscription-based media business — it's a great conversation.

This is from our live pod earlier this month in support of the National Writers Union's legal fund for media workers.