It’s going to get harder and harder to get social impressions. But it’s not because people will stop using social media…
It’s because social media has a supply-and-demand problem.
Here’s what I mean:
Demand is human attention: Human Attention = People x Time
Supply is competitive content trying to capture that attention
So this means demand is constrained, but supply is not. And now with AI, the gap between supply and demand is becoming much bigger.
The cost of creating the next decent piece of content is collapsing on every platform.
Because anyone can now use AI to:
Research ideas
Find outliers
Write scripts
Edit videos
And much more.
This means it’s never been easier for AI to create another billion terrible videos nobody wants to watch.
So the metric to focus on for you isn’t how many pieces of content you produce…
The important number is competitive content.
This is content that actually has the quality to compete for the same person’s attention.
And this is why the real equation to win the game of content is:
Relevant Human Attention / Competitive Content = Attention Available Per Piece
Imagine a niche has 1,000,000 available impressions with 100 competitive pieces.
In theory, this is 10,000 units of attention per piece. Let’s say the platform grows and now available impressions increase by 10%:
1,000,000 → 1,100,000
But competitive supply increases 5x:
100 → 500
Now it becomes:
1,100,000 / 500 = 2,200
So total attention grew by 10%, but the available attention per competitive piece fell from 10,000 to 2,200. This is a 78% decline.
In short, this means:
The platform grew
Total impressions grew
But the attention the competitive content got still declined
That is what I call The Great Impression Deflation.
The scarce resource is no longer content… it’s human attention.
Which means…
The bar for attention goes up.
Impression Deflation means distribution gets more extreme.
Which means these two statements can be true at the exact same time:
“It is getting harder to get views.”
And:
“That video just got 50 million views.”
In short, the average creator can lose more often while the biggest winners get bigger.
And then something predictable happens that is already going on today…
Everyone can see and swipe the winners.
Creators have always copied winners, but now AI compresses the cycle between identifying an outlier and posting it.
So the rule becomes:
The easier winning content becomes to find, the faster the advantage of finding it disappears.
But the good news is there is something you can do to make sure you find winning content without relying on finding these outliers…
Qualume is the solution.
Qualume = Quality x Volume
This is a concept my team uses internally.
Let me give you an example:
Let’s say Creator A produces 1 excellent piece per week.
On the other hand, Creator B produces 10 equally excellent pieces per week.
And so over ten weeks:
Creator A gets 10 shots at finding a winner.
Creator B gets 100 shots.
But there’s just one problem:
If Creator B increases volume 10x and quality collapses, the quality of those shots goes with it.
This is why Qualume isn’t to “post as much as possible.”
It’s simply: your maximum volume at your quality threshold.
It’s how you combine competitive content with Qualume.
But there’s another element that you need to add to your qualume if you want to build a big business with a small brand…
The rise of street cred.
This is where I think the next major creator advantage comes from.
Some reputations have an achievement that caused them:
Elon Musk has SpaceX.
Ray Dalio has Bridgewater.
Lionel Messi has eight Ballon d’Ors.
MrBeast has one of the most successful YouTube operations ever built.
But what actually makes these achievements credible?
Here’s the test I use:
If you take away the reputation, can the achievement recreate it?
Meaning:
If you take away Elon’s reputation, the achievement of SpaceX survives.
If you take away MrBeast’s reputation for understanding YouTube, his channel will still perform.
Now take someone with 3 million followers and 2,000 entrepreneurship videos.
If you take away the reputation…
What achievement remains that could recreate their reputation as an exceptional entrepreneur?
Is it an exit?
Is it building businesses?
Or maybe it’s their 2,000 videos that prove they’re very good at creating entrepreneurship content.
(Which is not the same thing as being very good at entrepreneurship.)
But here’s the thing:
Street cred is domain-specific.
SpaceX doesn’t establish Elon’s credibility on nutrition.
And Mr Beast’s channel doesn’t establish his credibility on investing.
And so this is why the achievement has to be capable of recreating the specific reputation being claimed.
Once you have your achievement that could recreate your reputation, it becomes your competitive advantage when creating content.
But how do you take this competitive advantage and turn it into Qualume for attention and leads?
Now “Document, don’t create” changes meaning.
Gary Vaynerchuk popularized “Document, Don’t Create.”
It means you don’t need to sit in a room trying to invent content.
If you own a pizza shop, you don’t need to start doing TikTok dances.
Instead you:
Make the pizza.
Show the dough.
Explain why you changed the sauce.
Show what happened when a pizza batch went wrong
You are simply documenting what you are already doing.
And this lowers the burden of creation. But I think Impression Deflation gives “Document, Don’t Create” a second purpose…
Because today the question stops being:
“What can I document so I don’t have to create new content from scratch?”
And instead it becomes:
“What am I intentionally documenting?”
Because documented content doesn’t automatically make it credible.
I’ll give you an example:
Two entrepreneurs are making content around the same topic:
“What I Learned Scaling a Company From $10M to $100M.”
Entrepreneur A is documenting everything they did to scale.
Entrepreneur B is creating content about what Entrepreneur A did to scale.
And with AI, the finished videos are equally good.
But Entrepreneur B will never be able to compete on credibility.
This is why Document, Don’t Create is a credibility strategy today.
Your experience creates the content.
And so this is why the only content test I care about now is:
If the camera disappeared tomorrow, would you still be doing the thing you are making content about?
If the answer is yes, the content has a credible source outside the content pipeline.
If the answer is no, your credibility depends on continuing to win the attention game with outliers and swiping…
It used to be much more difficult for the entrepreneur to compete in the content game before AI because creators had something they didn’t:
Distribution skill.
A creator knew hooks, thumbnails, trends, formats, algorithms, outlier research, and production.
They could create brand familiarity much faster than an accomplished person could distribute what they knew with volume and tactics.
But now AI gives the entrepreneur with credibility access to many of those same advantages.
In other words:
AI can increase the Qualume of your intentional documentation.
It can help you create competitive content at scale.
It can give accomplished people creator capabilities much faster than it can give creators accomplishment.
This is the competitive advantage you have to build a big business with a small brand.
Because now you’re optimizing for:
“What did I do today that is worth documenting?”
Not:
“What hooks, thumbnails, trends, and formats do I need to use to create my content for today?
This is why the formula for content today is:
Competitive content = Qualume x intentional documentation x credibility
So how can you apply this to your own business to help you build a big business with a small brand?
List all the street cred and achievements you have
Create two columns:
What have you accomplished? What are you accomplishing?
Fill them in because this is your street credibility to add into your content.
Create a “Daily Documentation Bank”
Whisprflow or write everything you did in your business that day with the date.
Use AI to speed up your content creation process
Use Claude to help you write a first draft, GPT to give you a thumbnail, or Higgsfield to edit a short.
The bottom line is that AI can help everyone make more content. But it can’t give them credibility.
And when anyone can look credible, the value of actually being credible becomes the new currency of attention.
If you enjoyed this post, I talk about my 4 tips for how to actually sell a business in this next one:
That is barz brother 😄🙏🥳🪴
"If the camera disappeared tomorrow, would you still be doing the thing you are making content about?" I'd pass that test by about twenty years. At one of the businesses I own, we invented and built a new product in two months, something that no amount of time or money could have brought to market before. In parallel, we executed twelve months of the product roadmap in just three, with the same team whose job descriptions changed as new, more capable models launched. None of that happened for an audience. I'm only writing about it now, after the fact, because AI took over enough of the work that I finally had the distance to look back at it. Your test cuts the other way for most people: not "can I document this," but "would this still be true if nobody was watching."