At karaoke on Tuesday, between a rough 'Landslide' and a rougher 'Africa,' three separate people told me about their podcasts. The host, who calls everyone baby, told me about his newsletter. I did not ask. In fairness, nobody has to ask anymore.
October in Portland is when the rain sets in and everyone quarantines themselves indoors with a USB microphone and a publishing account. By January the feed will be unrecognizable.
I am not being snobbish about this. More people making things is better than fewer people making things, and I have said so in rooms where that was an unpopular position.
But attention is the fixed quantity in this equation, and nothing about a rainy season expands it. Every new show, every new newsletter, every new fifteen-second dance is drawing from the same finite pool of evenings.
The problem is not that there is too much content. The problem is that oversupply drives everyone toward the safe middle, and the safe middle is where brands go to be forgotten.
You can hear it happening. The same warm intro music. The same 'hey, so, welcome back.' The same three-panel carousel with the sentence broken across slides for no reason. When a format gets crowded, people copy the parts that are easiest to copy, which are never the parts that made it work.
The brands that got in early look like geniuses and mostly are not. Into The Gloss became Glossier because it was one of maybe four places writing seriously about beauty routines in 2010. Casper launched Van Winkle's into a much noisier room and closed it inside two years. Same idea. Different weather.
So what do you do. Not more. The answer to a flooded market has never been to add water. Publish less, publish specifically, and be willing to be uninteresting to almost everyone. Oatly writes on the side of a carton and beats brands with content teams of thirty. Trader Joe's puts out a newsprint flyer a handful of times a year and people keep them in a drawer.
Ask the harder question before you greenlight anything: if this did not exist, would one real person notice. Most content teams have never been asked that, because the metric was volume and volume is easy to hit.
The answer to a flooded market has never been to add water.
I sang 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' badly and at full volume, which is the one thing that room could not have gotten anywhere else that night. Truffles and Barnaby have no podcast. It is the most restraint anyone in my house has shown all year.