Musings on evergreen content
Building an audience for ideas that last
FYI: This post is a bit meta—about writing/blogging itself—so it may not be your cup of tea.
I’ve been having some cognitive dissonance about blogging. On the one hand, I don’t believe in doing things primarily for legacy purposes, since in the long arc of history, hardly anything is likely to be remembered or matter that much, and I won’t be here regardless. On the other hand, I also don’t like spending a lot of my writing time on crafting for the ephemeral—like a social media post—because it seems that same writing time could be spent on developing something more evergreen.
I stopped blogging a decade ago following that same logic, focusing my writing time on books instead, which are arguably more evergreen than blogging. But, I’m obviously back here blogging again, and with that context, here are some dissonant thoughts I’m struggling with:
Is the chasing of more evergreen content just a disguised form of chasing legacy?
I think not because long-term legacy is about after you’re dead, and I’m not looking for something that will last that long. I’m more looking to avoid the fate of most content that has a half-life of one day, such that my writing can have more of an impact in my lifetime. That is, it’s more about maximizing the amount of impact per unit time of writing than any long-term remembrance.
Is there more value in more ephemeral content than I previously thought?
I’m coming to believe yes, which is why I’ve started blogging again, despite most blog posts still having that short half-life I’m trying to avoid. Specifically, I think there can be cumulative value in more ephemeral content when it:
Builds to something like a movement of people behind a thematic idea that can spring into action collectively at some point in the future, which is also why I started this up again on an email-first (push) platform.
Helps craft a more persuasive or resonant argument, given feedback from smaller posts, such as how comedians build up their comedy specials through lots of trial and error.
This last piece reminds me of Grounddog Day (the movie) where he keeps revising his day to achieve the perfect day, much like you can try to keep refining your argument until it perfectly resonates.
In any case, it’s hard to achieve occasional evergreen content if you don’t have an audience to seed it with and if you don’t have a fantastic set of editors to help craft it (which hardly anyone does except in a professional context). That is, putting out more ephemeral content can be seen as part of the process of putting out quality evergreen content, both in terms of increasing its quality (from continuous feedback) and in terms of increasing its reach (from continuous audience building).
Should I spend as much time editing these posts as I do?
Probably not, given that it is very rare for one of these posts to go viral / become evergreen. The problem is, I like editing. However, trying to stick roughly to a posting frequency and using formats like this one (Q/A headings) really helps me avoid my over-editing tendencies.
What is the relationship between blogging frequency and evergreen probability?
There’s no doubt that some blog posts are evergreen in that people refer back to them years after they were written (assuming they are still accessible). Does the probability of becoming evergreen have any relationship to the frequency of posting? You can make compelling arguments for both sides:
If you post more, you have more chances to go viral, and most people in a viral situation don’t know your other posts anyway, so the frequency isn’t seemingly inhibiting any particular post from going viral.
If you post less, you will likely spend more time crafting each post, increasing each post’s quality, and thus increasing its chances of virality, which I think (though I am not sure) is a necessary condition of evergreenness.
My current sense is that if you post daily, then you are unlikely to be creating evergreen content in those posts. Still, you can nevertheless have a significant impact (and perhaps more) by being top of mind in a faster-growing audience and influencing the collective conversation through that larger audience more frequently. That’s because there does seem to be a direct relationship between posting frequency and audience growth. However, posting daily is a full-time job in and of itself, and one I can’t personally do (since I already have a full-time job) and one I don’t want to do (since I don’t like being held to a schedule and also like editing/crafting sentences too much).
So, yes, I do think there is a relationship between frequency and evergreenness, and there is probably some sweetspot in the middle between weekly and monthly that maximizes your evergreen chances. You need to be top of mind enough to retain and build an audience (including through recommendations), you need enough posting to get thorough feedback to improve quality, and you need enough time with each post to get it to a decent quality in the first place. The full-timers also have other options, like daily musings paired with more edited weekly or monthly posts.
But, isn’t there a conflict between maximizing audience size and maximizing evergreen probability?
Yes, I think there is. If you want to maximize audience size, the optimal post frequency is at least daily, vastly increasing the surface area with which your audience can grow, relative to a weekly posting schedule (or even less). But, that frequency, as previously stated, is not the optimal frequency for optimizing the probability of producing evergreen content.
So, you have a tradeoff—audience size vs. evergreen probability. And it is a deeper tradeoff than just frequency, since I also think the kind of content that best grows audience size is much shallower than the kind of content that is more likely to go evergreen.
As noted, you can relax this tradeoff with more time input, which I don’t have. So, for right now, acknowledging this tradeoff, I think I’m going to stick to a few, deeper posts a month, maybe edited a bit less though. I’d rather build a tighter audience that wants to engage more deeply in ideas that can last than a larger audience that wants to consume shallower content that is more ephemeral. I hope you agree and I could also use more feedback!
For me, one layer beneath the tension between audience size and evergreen probability lies the tension between status vs connection. Everyone craves status, and audience size is perhaps now a stronger signal of status than wealth or looks. (Hence why so many Very Rich People who don’t need to work still hustle to have a big follower count.) But pursuing status can also distract us from connection, orienting us to building an invisible audience of strangers instead of becoming closer to the people we care about the most.
I grew up in suburban Southern California, where most conversations were about the weather, surf, and gossip. Blogging introduced me to dozens of people interested in the deeper questions of existence: how did we get here, where are we going, what’s nature vs. nurture, what explains differences between cultures.
Those conversations from — say, 2003 - 2010 — were more meaningful and valuable than anything I got from college. They unfolded in comment threads and often in series of posts linking back to each other. The evergreen topics. The good old days.
Occasionally they still happen. And there’s no reason why they couldn’t happen more, especially if I was more intentional about it. But like everyone, I find myself more distracted and dispersed, bouncing around a fragmented, chaotic pinball media ecosystem without necessarily knowing what information I want to consume or why.
Recently, I’ve had a few ideas about how to be better. The first is just to try to meet people I admire online in person. (So if I find myself in Philadelphia, I might drop you a note.) The second is to do more co-writing with others. The third is to invite a small group of likeminded people to a biweekly zoom call to discuss a single podcast episode or long form piece of journalism.
This comment may seem distant from the tradeoffs between blogging vs books, ephemeral vs. evergreen … but I suppose the reflection I wanted to share is that social connection can be its own form of legacy.