The internet is getting louder. Content sounds exactly the same, and ads are screaming at the same volume in every corner of the internet you go. So we keep scrolling faster and farther to find things we actually want to pay attention to, which narrows down our interests, forcing companies and platforms to show more ads and more noise just to keep showing similar results.
The current state of the internet is no accident. This was caused by the cost of making content dropping close to zero and the business mindset of making money at all costs. Every business with a social media account can now publish endless amounts of content without anything worth saying.
But somewhere inside all that noise, things are shifting. People are forming smaller communities. They’re starting to check if something was made by an actual person, and are starting to value things that take time to make. I think we’re at the beginning of a different kind of economy. Not the attention economy we’ve been talking about for the last decade. Something that runs on meaning instead.
This episode is about what that looks like for your business, and why the way you stand out now has almost nothing to do with how loud you can get. My name is Jiun and you’re listening to Anti-Viral, a human approach to marketing.
A Brief History of the Internet
Welcome to the second episode. I want to start by talking a little about the history of the internet and how it got to where it is today.
Back when the internet first started, it was basically the Wild West. Everybody was scared of it. People were poking fun at it, saying it was a fad, that it was going to change nothing. The few people who started creating websites were made fun of. What are you going to do with that? And yet those microblogs were what kickstarted the internet. Small groups of people trying something, writing about interesting things, and other people from around the world would come check it out and band together.
That eventually progressed to social media. MySpace, Facebook, all the things we know today. Which was a way to take that microblog idea and build it into a larger platform everybody could be a part of. That’s what normalized the internet. These progressions made it so that everybody just accepted it as part of how the world works.
You see the same thing with YouTube. Platforms built around images like Instagram. And now TikTok. And the latest technology, obviously the elephant in the room, is AI. Everybody is scared of what it can do, how well it works, whether it even means anything.
I think from that standpoint, we’re in the Wild West all over again. You can see this pattern going back even further. When TV first started, the radio industry was freaking out. When the telephone came around, everybody was scared. And yet here we are, using everything that has progressed over time.
Back when the microblogs were happening, everybody was just doing it for fun. There were no ads. It was an empty space. And slowly but surely, companies started realizing there was money to be made. Ads came in. Things went behind paywalls.
That’s what leads us to where we are today. The internet has gotten so large that I don’t have time to deal with things I’m not interested in. The world is too busy. Things are moving too fast. I have to pay attention to a thousand different things, so I try to tune out everything that doesn’t interest me.
Why Everyone Sounds the Same
That poses a problem for businesses trying to make money online. So what do they do? The easiest option is to throw more ads in, more noise, and hope that with enough of it something will happen. That’s a very common thought process in business. If you’re everywhere, at some point somebody will come to your store and buy something. At some point, with enough noise, someone will pay attention.
And everybody is thinking this way. Think about how many millions of companies are out there around the world, because the internet is worldwide. Every single one of them thinking the exact same way, creating the exact same amount of noise. And the platforms respond because everybody wants to put out more content. So let’s make it easier. And everybody’s okay with it.
Before the internet, things were kind of similar. This is why when you drive around, you still see billboards everywhere. That industry is still alive. It’s just moved to digital. But it’s the exact same idea.
Early on, all you needed was to be slightly better than the competition in your area. You could probably count your competitors on one hand. Maybe a handful of local businesses, a couple of multinationals. You could remember them. You could figure out who they were. The internet changed that entirely.
We kept the exact same process, the exact same methods, the exact same way of thinking. But now we’re competing with thousands of businesses trying to solve the exact same problem. And that makes being slightly different almost meaningless, because everybody is trying to be slightly different. This is where the noise starts drowning everything out. You feel like you can’t stand out, so you just start yelling as loud as possible.
There’s a word that entered the dictionary, I think around 2023 or 2024, called enshittification. It essentially means the degradation of online products. Because something becomes popular, demand increases and the ways to make money from it multiply. Advertising gets added in, features start getting removed because you can still make money without doing all that extra work. And the cycle continues.
How Algorithms Got Here
Going back to how everything works now: the algorithms, the companies that own the algorithms, they’re trying to respond to what the world is asking of them. Because if they didn’t, nobody would use their products. If Google and the social media platforms just did whatever they wanted without following what the majority of people care about, you could just go somewhere else.
So what these companies do is look at how people use their platforms and create ways to keep you there longer, for their benefit. Because everybody is putting out more content, they see that metric and they build more ways to publish. And because businesses want to throw money at the wall to see what sticks, they make that easier too. They make it so that money flows into their pockets instead.
That’s where the algorithms become what we have today: rewarding quantity over everything. You know the typical marketing advice. You need to be posting every single day. You need to be advertising every single day. You need to be everywhere all the time because at some point something will work. That growth at all costs mentality.
AI and the Content Flood
How do you compete with that? How do you change the approach when it feels completely unsustainable? And I think a lot of businesses feel that it is unsustainable. I think a lot of people don’t like marketing because of exactly that feeling.
Because of the sheer amount of content you have to put out, who has the time? That becomes a separate job on its own. You’re busy running your business, managing your team. Who has the time to think about and create good content every single day? Nobody.
So you make it as easy as possible. You get AI to do it, or you just don’t do it, or you do what typically always happens: you have something to sell, and that’s what you repeat everywhere forever.
And then everybody starts sounding the same, because nobody has the time. We all have a thousand different things we’re paying attention to. So we do what everybody else is doing. We do what feels easiest.
Now that AI is at a level where it’s good enough to prompt into creating blogs and social posts and whatever you need, the barrier of entry is almost nothing. AI can make content faster than any person could, all the time, as long as you’re paying for it. That drives quantity. The cost of what you can produce is close to zero now because everybody has access to it. And that makes standing out even harder, because there is just more content. More low quality content, but significantly more of it, and everybody has the capacity to produce it.
The Attention Paradox
There’s something I want to point out alongside this. As the cost of content drops close to zero because of AI, the price of attention is doing the opposite. It’s going up.
Because of the amount of noise out there, people have to pay closer attention to what they’re choosing. I can’t consume it all. There’s too much noise. Too many things to pay attention to. So I need to narrow things down and focus on what I actually care about. The things that connect with who I am. And then put blinders on.
That makes attention very valuable. And multiple companies and platforms are trying to figure out how to capture it. But they’re thinking about it the same way they think about algorithms: how can I game this? How can I commodify it? How can I manipulate someone’s attention so they stay here longer or pay attention to me instead of somebody else? And that’s where more noise and more yelling comes in. Maybe if I say something completely out of left field, people will stop. Even if it’s not true. Even if it has nothing to do with anything.
That’s kind of where we are. Trying to figure out how to game the system of a person’s attention.
Small Communities and the Rise of Real
What I’ve seen from the internet is that people have slowly started moving into smaller and smaller communities, even within the same platforms.
Facebook is still the largest social media platform by a wide margin. But when I go to Facebook, most of what I actually use it for is the smaller groups I’m a part of. My neighbourhood. The things I like. The things I care about. People are finding smaller communities because there’s less noise. I would much rather be in a Facebook group with a few hundred people about one very specific thing I care about than be in a worldwide group where there’s anybody and everything and it feels chaotic.
This is part of why places like Discord have become popular. It’s why Reddit is still a very popular medium. You can create your own subreddit, your own groups, and hang around with the people who actually care about this one specific thing. That tunes out so much of the noise.
Another thing I’ve been noticing: people are starting to state whether their content is human-made or AI-generated. Some companies and platforms actually require that disclosure now. But beyond that, the opposite is also happening. People are proactively stating that something was handcrafted, made by an actual human. And that immediately creates more value. When I see something that says it was hand-curated or made by a real person, I immediately feel like it’s going to be of a certain quality. I start thinking it’s probably going to be more expensive, but probably more worth it, because somebody actually thought about how to do it.
The reason this is happening is that people want real now. If you go to Amazon and want to buy something, the first thing most people do is scroll straight to the reviews. Not the product description. Because chances are the description is just going to tell you it’s the best thing since sliced bread. The reviews are what tell you whether it actually does what it says, whether there’s a flaw, whether real people had a good experience. People nowadays are looking for real. They used to look for professional. They used to look for polished. But now the world has turned toward wanting something that feels grounded. Something where you can actually trust what’s in front of you.
The Meaning Economy
And that’s where I’ve started thinking that we are finally moving away from the attention economy.
The attention economy has been talked about a lot in marketing. The idea being that you should be everywhere, post every day, gain as much attention as possible, because attention equals money. If you have a million followers or a million people on your email list, even at a 1% conversion rate, you’re going to get clients. That was the understanding.
What we’re moving into now is what I call the meaning economy. People are paying attention to meaning. To depth. To craft. Whether something has a level of meaning they consider valuable. And that level of meaning is what they’ll actually interact with.
There’s a lot of content being made by AI right now. Images, videos, video games using generative AI components. And people are becoming more attuned to this as it keeps showing up in the world. Whether they care depends on the context. Personally, if I see that a video game I want to buy used AI assets as a starting point that somebody finished off and turned into a final product, I’m okay with that. There’s still a level of craft I’m fine with.
Everybody’s going to have a different threshold. And that’s why I like calling it the meaning economy. Someone who is completely fine with anything made by AI and will happily pay for it? Great. That’s their threshold. And that’s okay. Same with everybody else finding theirs.
If you are a company crafting something with enough meaning for a certain group of people to actually care about, then you’ve found your people. The ones who will stick around. The ones who will actually buy from you long-term.
Perspective Over Productivity
Productivity is really not a differentiator anymore. AI can do things much faster than before. Things that took a long time for a person to make can now be done differently. Factory jobs that got automated didn’t necessarily change the quality of the final product. It was busy work that a machine can now handle. And I think we’re entering into the same idea online. Things that just took time are now something AI can take care of.
So productivity doesn’t separate us anymore. Perspective is what separates us now. Our ideas. The way we think. The way we construct things.
Business is still hanging around the old concept that the more productive you are, the more efficient you are, the more money you’re going to make. And that’s been true up to now. But with productivity no longer being the large differentiator, it’s perspective that matters. Your point of view. The way you see things. The way you describe things. That’s what’s going to start making the difference.
Understanding who you are and how you relate to others is going to become increasingly important. Your unique humanity is how you stand out. It’s what gives meaning to the content you put out. When you think about creating a post or running an ad or doing any kind of marketing, anybody can use AI to make something efficient or generalized. What’s going to make the difference is whether you can make something specific for a small group of people who actually care about that level of meaning, that level of depth.
That’s where I think we’re going. Understanding what you really care about, what you value, what you believe. And putting that out there as your point of view when you create content.
How to Show Up Differently
One of the things I usually coach people on when they ask how to actually start with this is to think about when you first meet a potential client. What do you say? What do you do? How do you interact with them? Are you funny in that conversation? Do you try to be as professional as possible? What is it that actually works with the people who really connect with you? Not just anybody who walks through the door, but the ones you really click with. What happens in that conversation?
Whatever you do in that in-person conversation is the same way you need to think about doing it online. Because there’s a large misunderstanding in digital marketing where people think that because they’re good in person, the second they go online they have to become someone else. More professional. More uptight. You have to wear a suit and tie in your digital marketing because that’s what works.
No. That’s not what works anymore. The way you build relationships offline is the same way you can build them online. It’s just that the way you think about it has to change a little bit.
People are no longer in the room with you when you’re doing your marketing. There’s no back and forth. You can’t ask a question and wait for a reply and start building from there. So now, as the business, you have to put the first foot forward. You have to imagine the other person is asking the questions, and you’re answering them. Who are you? Well, this is who I am. That’s what you put out there.
Putting yourself out there the way you naturally build relationships, just going first, is what will eventually lead to someone thinking, I really like what that person is saying. I get where they’re coming from. And then they come back. And hopefully they reach out, fill out a form, give you a call. But that first step is now the business’s job. That’s the main difference in digital marketing. That’s what most people get confused about.
The other thing I tell people is to start thinking about creating content for one person. Just one. Because it becomes a lot easier when you picture your best customer. The one who gets it. The one you really like. The one where you walk in and it feels like you’ve known each other for ten years. Think about how that relationship started. What questions did they ask? What did those conversations look like?
Talk to them. Explain things to them the way you would in real life. Because what you’re trying to do is attract more people like them. People who care about the same things you care about, who think the way you think, who value what you value. Showcase that, so that you can bring in others of the same caliber.
Loud used to be a competitive advantage. It really did. The same with professionalism. Back in the day, being professional set you apart because most people weren’t. Now everybody is. And loud, being everywhere, doing all the things, now it’s just noise. The businesses and people who will stand out over the next few years are not the ones who figure out how to be louder for cheaper. They’ll be the ones who take their time to craft meaningful, valuable pieces of content for their own small communities. Less is now more.
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you liked it, I hope you follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you’re listening from, and leave a review or email me. Tell me anything you’d want changed, anything you’d want improved, and how you want to receive this content.
We’re starting slowly, but we’re going to get into very specific topics like AI, SEO, advertising, and all of that. I want to build a good foundation of understanding marketing before we move into those areas. Let me know anything you enjoyed or anything you’d like to improve, and I’ll see you in the next episode.