How to beat ChatGPT and the new wave of Content Shock

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been nine years since I wrote a well-known blog post called Content Shock. For the uninitiated, this post predicted that when business niches overflow with useful, high-quality content, a never-ending content arms race results. For many businesses, competing would become increasingly expensive, and content marketing would not be a sustainable strategy.

Proposing that there were limits to content marketing was considered scandalous at the time, but undoubtedly, it was true, and “Content Shock” became a well-known term in the industry.

But look where we are today!

With the introduction of ChatGPT and other AI platforms, the cost of creating content has been reduced to almost nothing, the quality has matched or surpassed the abilities of many creators, and a tsunami of new content is rising.

Here are examples of the new wave of Content Shock:

• A science fiction magazine now receives so many AI-generated stories that it stopped taking submissions.
• Amazon is overwhelmed with new ChatGPT book submissions. One author “wrote” a 119-page novella in a day and claimed he would write 300 books in a year. Amazon Direct Publishing is so swamped it is increasing its costs for a self-published book for the first…