The Death of “The Death of” Articles – If Only
You’ve see them everywhere. They’re just sitting around on the Internet like regular posts. They don’t know they’re stupid.
What am I talking about? The ubiquitous posts about “the death of <something>.”
“The death of email.”
“The death of content marketing.”
“The death of <insert thing you rely on>.”
What’s wrong with them? They’re peddling fear to sell you stuff, that’s what. They say, “hey, that thing you rely on is going away! TIME TO PANIC!” and then, inevitably, at the end of the article there’s a call to action where they sell you their simple answer to the pain.
These sorts of business “articles” are really just “This One Weird Trick” ads dressed up in a suit and tie. They falsely promise easy solutions to complex problems.
But isn’t there some truth in them? Surely some of these things are actually dying, aren’t they? What about all the numbers and stories?
Over time, many things will die out, yes. However, I’ve yet to see an argument that actually shows valid evidence rather than extrapolating noise into a “shocking trend”.
I find myself persuaded by the “Lindy Effect”, as coined by Benoit Mandelbrot and espoused by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile:
“If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!”
Let’s look at some of the things that are supposed to be “dying”.
The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971. So email has been around for around 45 years. According to Lindy’s Law, we can reasonably expect email to be around for another 45 years.
Now it isn’t really fair to call Lindy’s Law a law — it’s more of a heuristic. Clearly is cannot be true for everything, because things die out all the time. So it may be true that email actually is dying out. But I don’t see any real evidence for that.
On the contrary, email is still one of the most personal spaces on the Internet. Somewhere you can invite people to contact you directly, where what they send you doesn’t quickly vanish down an endless timeline, but sits there waiting for you. It’s still one of the most permanent digital media. You can search for an email you got 10 years ago and have a decent chance of finding it. Try that with a random tweet.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is even older. Like, really old. It’s communication: teaching, entertaining, telling stories, persuading… It’s as old as language. I confidently predict that it’s not going anywhere any time soon. Communicating well is still going to convey authority, build trust, spread messages, educate, entertain…
Now, it’s probably true that it’s getting harder to succeed with certain types of content marketing. It might be harder for spammy emails to cut through filters and rise above the ever-increasing noise. But those are different problems from the channel itself dying.
So what
The devil is in the details, not in simplified trends extrapolated from limited data points. Like so many things in life, the answer you seek is simple, but it’s not easy. There is no easy route.
When it comes to content marketing or email, this is particularly painful because making great stuff is necessary but not sufficient. You can be phenomenal and still not get the traction you hoped for.
But the answer isn’t to go with a charlatan who — like a snake-oil peddler of yore—stirs up your pain and anxiety before selling you a “miracle cure.”
The next time you feel the fear bite while reading an article about “the death of <this thing you rely on>”, step back and think about what the author is selling and why they want you to be afraid.
I’m afraid I can’t offer you an easy answer for what to do instead, though I can tell you that luck is going to play a larger part than you’d like. For now, all I have to leave you with is a heuristic for detecting which things you can safely ignore:
If you can rewrite an article’s sales pitch as “This One Weird Trick for Easy Success!” then you can safely close the tab and ignore the fear.