In my last post I said that the three costs of content consumption are attention, time, and opportunity. I have written about the first two previously, but I want to use this post to address the last of these costs: opportunity.

Opportunity is the most subjective cost because it is entirely dependent on the individual’s personal sense of value; this also makes it, however, the final arbiter of the waste/value judgement over all the other costs in the individual’s mind. Whether people act like it or not, there is limited time and attention available to each of us for consuming content. This means you (and your customers) must choose what you will pay attention to and what you won’t.

But how do you decide?

As I alluded to above, it once again comes down to value, and value comes down to desire and utility. In other words, every time you are faced with some content, somewhere subconsciously you are asking yourself:

“Do I want or need to see/hear this right now?”¹

And then, if the answer is “yes,” the follow up:

“Do I want or need to do anything else instead?”²

If the answer is “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, then the content has won the contest of opportunity and you will spend the time required to pay attention to it. Otherwise, the content has lost and you will keep scrolling, searching for a more attractive opportunity.

While the reality of doomscrolling as America’s new favorite pastime makes it seem as though every person has an infinite appetite to attend every content opportunity, this is simply not the case—nor should we treat it as such.

Because here’s the thing:

Attention only seems infinite until you try to attend infinitely.

Afterall, infinite consumption is the definition of gluttony.

And gluttony will always lead to diet.

And a diet is a rigged contest in which all opportunities that we simply want or like are impelled to lose to those which we need.

So . . .

Is your content diet-proof?

1. this establishes that it may offer something of value to you ↩︎
2. this weighs the value of this opportunity against the potential value of all other opportunities ↩︎

I’ve written before about the time-cost of content, but time is not the only cost associated with consuming content.

If I were to lay out a more complete picture of this time-for-content exchange, it would probably look something like this:

content costs attention
attention costs time
time costs opportunity

Of these three costs — opportunity, time, and attention — attention is maybe the most important. I really don’t think that many people consider seriously enough the implications of asking others to pay attention to their content. After all, attention is the raw material which makes up our very experience of existence.

In her 2009 book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher puts it this way:

Seen in this light, I think everyone who creates content would have a much different idea of the responsibility that comes with asking others for attention.¹

One way to be conscientious about this reality is to ask yourself when you begin to create content:

“How do I want people to be different after they experience my content?”

Because people will be different after they experience your content.

1. there is also responsibility associated with the paying of attention, but that is not the issue at hand ↩︎

If you stop playing algorithm games and just let people forget about you, the only ones who won’t are the ones who can’t.

And the ones who can’t are the ones who really want or need what you’re offering.

And if they really want or need what you offer, they will probably pay money for it.

And why would you waste your time creating content for anyone else?

Hello friends,

This is a slightly different kind of post. It’s one of those good(ish) news/bad(ish) news kinds of things. (It’s also probably longer than most of you need, so TL;DR at the end.)

The bad(ish) news is that this will no longer be a daily newsletter. I started ​the content mint​ over the summer for a handful of reasons, one of which was to force myself to start blogging in some form—which I had intended to do for many years. Another reason was to solidify some of my ideas related to what it means to create worthwhile content in the current internet landscape and publish them in a place where my prospective video production clients could glimpse my thought process before beginning a project with me.

While I believe I have accomplished both of those goals, I have also discovered a couple of downsides to writing a specialized daily newsletter—namely, that it is specialized and daily. In the first place, a daily newsletter must, by nature, be quite concise for the sake of both the author and audience, but I’ve found that, like Pascal, I don’t everyday have ​the time to make it properly concise​. In the second place, the time that it does take to write every day leaves me little extra time to write about other things that interest me but which fall outside the scope I established for this newsletter, i.e. content marketing and media communication for small businesses.

The final consideration is my audience, y’all. There are less than a dozen of you on the list and nearly every one of you I know personally. According to my stats, every one of you open my emails almost every day, which I very much appreciate, but at the same time, since I know you all, I know that the majority of you aren’t creating business content—you just know me and want to know what I’m up to.

So that brings me to the good(ish) news, which is that I am starting a new blog that will not be daily or specialized. It will just be updates on things that I’m thinking about or doing whenever I deem that they are interesting enough to write about. You know, how blogs used to be.

As an indication of the sporadic nature of the content, I’m calling the new blog: ​Now . . . This​.

If you are one of the few subscribers who don’t know me too well yet (thank you especially for subscribing!), you can expect writing on this new blog to be related to film, literature, communication, and technology, mixed in with armchair philosophy and maybe even some original fiction, who knows. I currently have a handful of Christmas-related posts I will be trying to release in the next week or so. (Working titles include: “Home Alone and the Fear of the Unknown”, “The Most Important Character in A Christmas Carol”, and “A Grimm Tale to Read at Christmastime”.)

In the interest of not wasting your time in case you aren’t interested in the same myriad of things I am, you will not be automatically subscribed to the new blog. Which is to say, you’ll need to manually subscribe to the new content ​here​, if you so choose. Alternately, just know that it exists and feel free to check in periodically without letting it assert itself into your consciousness (or inbox) through push notifications. Whatever you like.

Again, I appreciate you all for your daily attention over the past several months. I don’t expect the content mint to go away entirely; anytime I have something to share which falls in the category of business media, you’ll still get an email from this list, just not every day.

So with that, I’ll wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and, in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.