The tools all delivered. Publishing is free, distribution is one tap, editing that once required a studio runs on a phone, and AI now drafts, cuts, and captions. The stated dream — everyone can be a creator — largely came true. What the dream skipped over is an accounting identity: every hour of content consumed requires a human hour of attention, and human hours stopped growing. Content supply exploded against a fixed attention budget, and markets have exactly one response to that arrangement.
The economics, stated plainly
When supply rises against inelastic demand, the price falls. The price of content is attention, so the attention paid to the average piece of content has been falling for years and will keep falling — more creators, more posts per creator, machine-generated volume on top, all bidding for the same fixed pool of waking hours. This isn't a moral observation or a tech-backlash take. It's what happens in any market where production costs collapse: the median producer's return trends toward zero.
The other reliable feature of such markets is concentration. When choice is overwhelming, consumers economize by defaulting to known names, and recommendation systems amplify whatever already shows engagement. Attention markets are hit-driven for structural reasons — a small fraction of creators captures the large majority of consumption, and a swelling long tail publishes into near-silence. More supply makes this steeper, not flatter.
The part the title overstates
"Nobody is an audience" is, taken literally, false — audiences are enormous; people consume more content than ever. What's true is subtler and worse for the median creator: the ratio collapsed. When a meaningful share of your potential audience is also publishing, also chasing reach, also checking their own numbers, engagement changes character. Some of it becomes reciprocal and strategic — attention paid in hope of attention returned — rather than genuine consumption. Anyone who has watched their comments fill with fellow creators while actual customers stay silent has felt this. The purely consuming audience still exists; it's just a shrinking fraction of the visible activity, and it doesn't comment much.
What still works in a glut
A supply glut doesn't punish everyone equally. It punishes the substitutable. The strategies that hold up are the ones that opt out of commodity competition:
- Narrow beats broad, decisively. "Marketing tips" competes with functionally infinite supply. Substantive writing on, say, pricing for boutique consultancies competes with almost none, and reaches people who can't get the substitute elsewhere. In a glut, the niche is not the consolation prize; it's the defensible position.
- Trust becomes the scarce input. When anyone can produce competent-looking content on any topic, the question shifts from "is this well-made?" to "who is telling me this, and why should I believe them?" Track record, named experience, skin in the game — the things that can't be generated — carry a rising premium.
- Direct channels beat feed reach. A reader who gave you their email or turned on notifications has removed you from the auction. The glut happens in the feed; a subscriber list is the room next door, where you're the only one talking.
- Depth is a filter, not a handicap. Effortful work — original analysis, real reporting on your own results, positions that took years to earn — repels the drive-by scroll and selects for exactly the reader the glut made rare: one who actually wanted it.
The reframe worth keeping
The creator economy's founding pitch was that the tools were the barrier, and removing them would democratize success. The tools were removed. What's left as the barrier is the thing tools never provided: having something to say that a specific set of people can't easily get from anyone else. That was always the real scarce asset — the glut just repriced everything else to zero and made it obvious.
So the honest strategic question in a buyer's market for attention isn't "how do I produce more?" Production is the one thing nobody needs more of. It's "for which small group of people am I genuinely hard to substitute?" Answer that, and the glut is mostly happening to other people.