The Road to Content Irrelevance
Creeping towards YouTube Doom
The last year has been an interesting one.
Last Summer, in June 2019, I decided to go full-time with content creation, working on Keep Productive, a channel and site dedicated to helping people find the right productivity software — a niche for sure.
Skip forward one year, and whilst things are going well — with views even up 30% during pandemic lockdowns (due to remote work focus) — I’m seeing a downward spiral in the relevance of the channel and content.
1. Growing Market
When we started Keep Productive back in 2012 (well named “Francesco D’Alessio” at the start), a side from the main players like Steve Dotto and DottoTech, there were very few tool focused sites.
The niche slotted in well…
Skip forward 5 years and now the market is buzzing!
Folks are dedicating channels entirely to the tools like Roam and Notion and new upstarts can sprout an interest in a tool — and within a week or two have a channel with dozens of videos — the barrier to entry has been lifted.
This is absolutely smashing.
But poses challenges for channels like mine. I need the following qualities to carry on making Keep Productive videos relevance:
- Speed — the pace of production to publish
- Research — higher quality research involved beforehand
- Whit — you need a certain level of personality to keep people entertained
The tool space is becoming more inclusive and eager to learn, with tools like Notion opening up the user to millions of possible outcomes.
So a growing market is one of the biggest factors playing into content irrelevance, people will migrate to the better, more fine-tuned channel, so it’s key to stay ahead with these 3 key metrics.
2. Video Consumption
Whilst I don’t think audio is the future, I do believe people will stop consuming videos as they once did, or at least in a different manner.
I’m not sure I’m totally sure people will consume subscriptions anymore like they once did through YouTube.
It feels like this could very well be old hat and a new platform helps to break communities away from each other — eg. having a community for business, finance, health, fitness — that is customised to each of the viewers — more community focused versus one hub for everything.
This is why I’m deciding to invest more into the website, becoming a hub for the content — I think that people will soon consume all of their video inside of the article tab for productivity, so that’s where I’m paying close attention.
3. Quality of Production
Hot shots in the space, like Shu Omi and Conrad Lim, both wise in their skillsets are producing fantastic pieces of content — and growing fast!
Timing is on their side and with their energy and passion they’ll be very fast to rise to the top of the leagues.
This level of content creation and production — is sadly something Keep Productive has lacked and needs back. At the start, we were very focused on producing different formats of videos and quite frankly, we’ve become lazy on our approach to video formats and new innovative takes on software.
All in all, I think if I don’t adapt in the next 6–12 months, Keep Productive will be a thing of the past, the passion people had for the service will be gone and no longer useful if things don’t change, if these lessons aren’t implemented.
- To all the followers of Keep Productive — I’m eager and ready to take on this new challenge of making productivity fun through our efforts.
- And to all those with channels and content to produce — I’m sure if you’ve not felt like this at some point, you may soon — or may already have. Any advice you can share with me on my journey would be much appreciated.
