When starting out as a creator, one of the most common pieces of advice you receive is to stay consistent. High output at a consistent rate is highly regarded.
However, I’d be hard pressed to back this advice long-term. In fact, I believe this is the same advice or line of thinking that’ll shave years off a creator’s career and lead them to plateau a lot faster.
Being consistent usually revolves around creating content within a specific domain. The problem here is, the more consistent a creator becomes, the more their content shapes one’s identity.
The issue becomes more of a problem if creators feel they’ve outgrown their content.
For example, YouTube creators who’ve started off creating pranks at a young age may not feel the same enthusiasm for that type of content years down the line.
Still, many opt on compromising their creative direction and let the grip on their futures slide, allowing for their content to lead them instead of themselves.
One way to spot this is if you (the creator) are finding yourself looking to fans for content direction i.e. “What would you guys like to see next?”.
Creators need to understand that the majority of their fans do not know what they want until they get it.
Subsequently, if a creator has struck gold the first time, fans will want more of what has attracted them in the first place.
It’s up to creators to know what their fans want next before they know themselves.
The answer to this is reinvention.
Reinvention & Breaks
Reinventing yourself as a creator can feel like walking on a tightrope, if done poorly, creators risk losing large portions of their fanbase.
The trick is rebranding reinvention as ‘breaks’.
Ed Sheeran letting his fans know he’s taking time off.
By changing your state of mind and messaging, pressure to deliver as a creator is almost relieved instantly and fans approach the notion with sympathy, rather than viewing it as an act of separation; separation between the content creator they knew, and themselves.
Breaks are a pillar in society, especially in competitive contexts. Psychologically, breaks offer us the chance to leave the past behind and start fresh. It’s an incredible motivating force used famously by athletes where they’ll work through the summer to perform better in upcoming seasons.
Perhaps less apparent, breaks are also used for reinvention. Note that in sports contexts, this often means physical reinvention however, in creative contexts, breaks are utilised to change creative direction and find inspiration. For example, the fashion & music industry.
Due to the repetitive nature of music though, compared to content creators, musicians face backlash sooner in relation to consistency. A listener will likely grow tired of the same content from an artist far quicker than a viewer on YouTube. Or in other words, there’s a heightened sense of expectation for fresh new content within music. Again, due to the rate of consumption of music i.e. it’s common for people to listen to albums many times over.
This is not the case for internet content. Often times, videos are viewed only once, and the majority of content creators do not publish every day. Consequently, backlash is delayed for content creators and they’ll continue to stay consistent — creating the content that is working for them until, viewers lose interest.
By then, like a big company attempting to be nimble, the content creator has been so set on doing things a particular way for too long — due to prolonged consistency, that they find it challenging to change their identity.
If at that point, change is attempted, viewers view this as a ‘Hail Mary’ to recapture their attention. It very seldom ends in the favour of the creator and I’d argue it’s due to being blind sighted by a creator’s own success and opting for short term comfortability instead of taking risks to increase their runway for relevance.
Unfortunately, there’s a slight caveat, the internet content industry does not embrace breaks. As a creator too much time off screen can also lead to your stock going stale. The internet moves fast.
So how does one stay relevant, but also afford the time to shed new skin?
The diversification Theory
Is it a matter of quality over quantity?
Yes and no.
Surprisingly, some do both at the same time.
Perhaps two of the biggest names in their respective fields currently, Drake (Music) & KSI (YouTube) attribute a large part of their success to their ability in reinventing themselves numerous times where others have not.
Both have cracked the code on how to do so whilst staying relevant at the same time. The answer is diversification.
Diversification within content, is the art of producing or partaking in content of various genres and formats alongside each other.
Drake is often touted as one of most diverse artists in the world. Though interestingly enough, not all of his fans listen to all of his music.
Due to his diverseness, his fans have naturally divided into their respective subsets, each listening to one or more of the content categories they enjoy from the artist.
It’s helpful to view diversification as a Rubik’s Cube.
A Rubik’s Cube has six faces, and only one face can be faced down at any given time. Similarly, in diversification, content creators can only show one content genre to fans at a given time. As a result, all other content genre’s come up for air, keeping fans on their toes about what’s coming next.
Drake does this terrifically well. The Canadian artist produces six genres of music (Hip hop, Contemporary R&B, Pop music, Trap music, Drill music & Dancehall). Let’s assume that each category is a face on the cube.
Drake alternates between each category fairly; each face of his Rubik’s Cube gets a share of the facedown time it deserves.
The magic comes from the artificial breaks that is caused by diversification.
If Drake were to only consistently produce Dancehall music, he’d have to take breaks between albums, instead this approach gives him the opportunity to stay relevant throughout the year by switching genres.
You can view it as lifting pots of the stove whilst having various other pots on the stove too, each with their own cooking times.
This way, as a creator, you become less consistent in one content domain thus, less predictable.
KSI has become a pioneer of this technique for internet content. In fact, so much so that he is the only YouTuber ever to have over 10 million subscribers over two accounts and a possible third is inevitable, with the third channel he’s involved in touching 9 million subscribers.
Like Drake, KSI switches between wherever he feels most inspired to work.
I’d recommend all content creators to develop a content workflow like Drake & KSI, all it requires is some forward planning and it’ll pay off dividends in the future.
‘The biggest event in internet history’ KSI’s hand is raised after winning the boxing bout. He embarked on boxing after taking a break from YouTube.
What this means is instead of staying consistent in one domain, use diversity to your advantage to utilise breaks between ‘genres’. In turn, staleness is delayed and tying up identity to a certain genre is avoided.
Like musicians, use these intermittent breaks to rejuvenate yourself as a creator, find inspiration and assess where you are — content wise — whilst staying active.
Much like the music industry — ‘internet content’ shares a similar denominator practiced very commonly: Features.
If you find you need to step back a little longer, make sure to use featuring in other creators’ content to your advantage.
Many creators think that prolonged disappearances can lead to increased demand from viewers.
For example, fans waiting on Adele to release a new album or Eddie Murphy to return to stand up.
The fact is, if you are in the lucky enough to be in this situation as a creator, your comeback will have to meet the high expectations of your eagerly waiting fans. If not, your stock falls as fans either assume you haven’t put in the effort or you’re simply not as good as you used to be.
Similarly, keep them waiting for too long, and you’ll see yourself fall down the pecking order.
Featuring in other creators’ content will help you stay relevant the same way that fighters’ trash-talk when they aren’t fighting.
If you can take something away, it’s that as a creator don’t be afraid to risk it all, use risk to stay ahead of your audience.
After-all, your fans will never tell you to reinvent yourself i.e. KSI’s fans hadn’t first approved of his switch to music or boxing.
Originally published at https://anash.substack.com.
