Hey friends,
Fitting for something I’m sending over Labor Day Weekend, I’ve been reflecting on how important it is to appreciate the work that goes into creativity. I love thinking about how and why things are made. I have an appreciation for the effort that goes into coming up with an idea, bringing it to life, and refining it so it’s ready for a wider audience to enjoy or participate. Making things is what makes us human, and creative fulfillment and self-expression are key components of self-actualization.
That’s why it gets under my skin when creative pursuits get reduced to being a product instead of a process– the consum-ability of the results rather than the culmination of the efforts.
It’s a tension that plagues writers, to be sure, but because of our culture and economic incentives, spans a wide array of pursuits.
For example, a YouTube personality I’ve followed for a while– icklenellierose– recently uploaded a video titled “YouTube Made Me Make This Video or Else I’d Be Demonetised (Again).”
Ellen, who portrays Merilwyn in the Oxventure Dungeons & Dragons series, is not the kind of person I’d suspect of getting demonetized, since that’s a punitive measure I mainly associate with content violations in which a video contains potentially harmful or copyrighted materials in violation of the platform’s Terms of Service.
Sure, Merilwyn is a little bit of a war criminal. But not Ellen!
As it turns out, the sins of icklenellierose were of the most egregious kind… she hadn’t uploaded a video recently enough for YouTube’s Partner Program. Between her job and dealing with chronic illness, she’d stepped away from her personal YouTube channel for a little while, opting to recharge and think about what she’d want to create instead of churning out content.
Describing a similar instance in the past, she said, “I've been a partner since 2011 on YouTube and [sighs] I got an email while I was working on a video that said that I had to meet a certain amount of watch hours by a certain date, like within 30 days of that email, or I would lose my partnership status and wouldn't be eligible for money, like adverts for my videos. [...] I worked super extra hard to finish the video way faster. Like to a point where I was rushing on it and I would make silly errors.”
When someone is demonetized, they must reapply to the YouTube Partner Program to earn ad revenue again, which is frustrating for creators who want to take time between uploads to plan content, draft scripts, record, edit, and ensure they’re doing a high-quality job. That’s a problem not just for creators, but for YouTube as well.
YouTube has taken a lot of heat for having a slop problem recently. While no major advertisers have publicly pulled out of the platform, the spotlight on it has prompted advertisers to ask how much of their ad budget is being wasted on bot traffic to low-quality content.
In 2025, video-editing platform Kapwing published research suggesting that “21-33% of YouTube’s feed may consist of AI slop or brainrot videos.” That number gets even worse when the YouTube account is associated with children. In those instances, it’s closer to 40%. This abundance of slop led to this summer’s “YouTube slop purge,” in which YouTube removed around 130,000 accounts (roughly 0.1% of the estimated 114,000,000 total accounts on the platform).
While AI has amplified this problem, it’s not entirely new. Content farms have been cranking out low-quality videos for years now, with some even including pre-recorded engagement bait targeted at children that gets broadcast as a livestream. All low-quality content that’s pumped out in bulk to maximize potential audience capture so that these channels can pull in ad revenue.
It’s the same business model that plagues social media and, to a lesser extent, even newsletters as a whole. Quantity gets rewarded more than quality. On paper, platforms like YouTube say they want high-quality, engaging content; that’s also the talking point they present to advertisers who don’t want their business on screen next to something asinine or inappropriate.
And yet, the economics support a more-is-more model when clicks and views are the primary metrics by which users succeed and earn money.
Create more, earn more. Create less-but-better? Earn less, unless your video is a megaviral outlier.
As a writer, it’s frustrating to deal with these conditions as the economic reality of trying to grow online. As a product manager, I can see that the entire business model behind social media platforms– including YouTube and TikTok– essentially requires quantity over quality as the primary approach. Large, publicly traded entities are expected to return shareholder value (as there are actual fiduciary obligations for executives that could land them in hot water if they don’t).
Returning shareholder value can be reduced to a pretty simple equation: more money, less money out. Increase revenue, reduce costs. More profit, more gooder.
For a distribution platform to reward quality over quantity, a few things have to be true:
There has to be a set measure of quality. Subjectivity already makes step one a stumbling block.
Revenue has to be tied to quality, which could mean:
Advertisers pay more to be paired with higher-quality content.
The platform shares a larger cut of revenue for higher quality (which hurts their margins).
Users pay a premium subscription fee for a filtered, high-quality experience (a model few UGC platforms have successfully scaled without cannibalizing their ad business).
The platform's algorithm must accurately and programmatically assess "quality" without relying on human curation, which is too expensive and slow for a user-generated content model.
The supply of high-quality content must be vast enough to keep users engaged for hours on end, satisfying their infinite scrolling habits. If a platform only serves a small amount of high-quality content, users will eventually run out and leave, taking their ad views with them.
Ultimately, a UGC platform cannot scale to a billion users by acting like a boutique publisher. Quality requires friction, curation, and time—all of which are the natural enemies of an ad-based model that relies on endless inventory and infinite scrolling. The algorithm isn't broken; it's doing exactly what the fiduciary duties require: optimizing for the highest volume of human attention at the lowest possible cost.
That, dear reader, is exactly why I include the tagline “Reflection is Resistance” in the footer of each email. It’s my little reminder that the slower, crafted approach is directly at odds with the economic forces that are shoving us closer and closer to a world of slop. It’s okay to care about doing things the right way– advised even!
Things are the way they are, but that’s not how they have to be. I still believe in a world where writers can grow and thrive online without being crushed under the heel of expectations to churn out more and more content.
(And I have some ideas about ways we can do that that I’m not quite ready to share just yet– this issue is getting too long, and I still need to let the wacky idea I started nurturing this week simmer a bit longer.)
For now, what I can advise is spending a little time this weekend getting lost in your work. Let yourself be meticulous. Try something, throw it out, and try again. Write something out, and then set the page on fire. However you approach it, focus on the process, not the product. You owe it to yourself.
Until next time,
Blake
