Content's Volume Epidemic

There's a specific emotion when you read something that resonates. Like it was created specifically for you.

I'm not talking about content that's targeted at you, that's different. I mean something where you can tell, tangibly, that the person who made it sees you, gets your problems, and cares about whether you found it useful, interesting, and worthy of your next few minutes.

It's a feeling we're losing now that anyone can generate content en masse with a single-sentence prompt.

Volume is easy to measure, and that's the problem.

Content marketing as a whole is experiencing a volume epidemic. It's not new — there have always been those who believe volume is the name of the game. But generative AI has turned what was once a manageable problem into a full-blown crisis of sameness.

The feeds are noisier than ever, the output is fast, and almost all of it says a lot of nothing.

ICYMI: The Feed is Full. Now What? »

I get why it happens, in theory. Volume is easy to measure, easy to report up. "We published 40 pieces this month" is an easy-to-pull number that looks good in a slide deck when executives are laser-focused on the shiny object. But whether those 40 pieces moved someone — made them think differently, helped them solve a problem, or made them feel seen in their work — that's harder to capture. So it often doesn't get captured at all.

Understanding that gap, and caring enough to critically think about how to close it, is what separates strong leadership from the kind that is just keeping the engine running.

And yet most of the pressure is seemingly moving in the opposite direction.

Quantity has a legitimate case (in some spaces).

I'll give volume its due. There are real cases where producing content at scale has upside — like SEO and AEO, where comprehensiveness and structure get rewarded. If you're trying to get indexed, to rank, to be referenced, creating quickly and in bulk gives the algorithms more to work with. I get the argument.

But here's where I think people draw the line in the wrong place: SEO and AEO aren't an excuse to skip quality. They're the plumbing for the quality, not a replacement for it. Every good piece still needs pipes. It needs to be structured so it can get found, indexed, and referenced. That's not the enemy of substance. In fact, it's what gets that substance in front of people.

The mistake is building the pipes and forgetting to put anything good through them. A piece built to rank and a piece built to resonate can be the same piece. Most of the time, they should be.

This isn't a new frontier for content marketers.

"How many blogs have we published? How much is in the content pipeline?" Content marketers have been answering questions like these (usually with an eye roll behind the screen) for years. In plenty of environments, volume is the bar (on top of everything else that's supposed to matter).

If you're cranking out content with a prompt to hit a quota, you're not actually worried about whether the audience is reading it, responding to it, or finding it useful.

You're talking for the sake of talking. And what you end up with is noise — content that blends into everything else in the feed because it was built to exist, not to resonate.

There's something almost disrespectful about that. To your audience, your brand, and, frankly, to the people on your team who are capable of better. You're not thinking about your core audience's pain points or what might actually help them, you're just worried about hitting a meaningless number.

Keeping up isn't the same as standing out.

The counterargument I hear most: quality takes time, and in an age where anyone can generate at will, nobody has it. Or, a version of that same argument — our competitors are publishing more, so we need to keep pace.

Fair, to a point. But pace isn't the thing being judged. If someone's reading both you and your competitor, they're not tallying who posted more this month. They're noticing who's actually giving them something useful.

The volume war is invisible to the person you're trying to reach. The value gap isn't.

Sometimes, the content that fails is just as informative.

Quality is a bet. You invest the time, put it into the world with a hypothesis, and it's hard to know how it's going to perform until it's out there.

We've all published something we were proud of that didn't perform. But these aren't failures. I've found that more often than not, there's more to learn from what doesn't land as much as from what does.

Content that falls flat tells you something — about timing, about your audience, about the topic and the channel. The answer isn't always obvious or comfortable. But that's usually where the good stuff is. And giving your team room to take those swings — to learn from the misses as much as the hits — is how you build a culture and a content strategy that actually wins.

So what actually matters?

What I keep coming back to is this: content that doesn't ask anything of itself, and the team creating it, won't ask anything of the reader, either.

The best pieces are the ones where someone takes a strong position, tells a specific story, or shares something useful. Not because it will rank or it's the safe, on-brand asset, but because the belief is that it will resonate with your audience and be something informative, helpful, or emotion-invoking.

In a feed full of AI-generated jargon wrapped around a thousand words that say nothing, one piece that makes someone stop and think stands out in a way no volume strategy can replicate. You can't prompt your way to that. You need a team that cares, and most importantly, is allowed to care. And caring, it turns out, can still be a key differentiator.