How to take advantage of margins in content creation
I’ve been working on slides for online courses.
I launched this course earlier this year and it’s been doing well enough that I’m trying to repeat the success.
The problem is that it takes a lot of time to make the slides.
Each course has 200-300 slides.
It’s relatively easy to use AI to create an outline and then fill in some content.
The hard part is customizing each slide, adding graphics/images, and making the whole deck flow in a logical way that is conducive to learning.
So I’ve been seeking help with the slide-creation part.
Now you have the context.
Here’s what I realized and why I’m writing this …
Margins in content creation
In some cases, there is a margin between the expense of creating content and the revenue of publishing content.
For example, you can pay someone on Fiverr to write a book, and then publish the book on Amazon KDP. It’s a good business if the expense of the Fiverr ghostwriter is less than the revenue from Amazon book sales.
Or, you can pay a video creator to create a video, then publish it on YouTube and collect the ad revenue. It’s a good business if the expense for the video creator is less than the YouTube ad revenue.
But sometimes the expense is more than the revenue, either because:
You haven’t set up the necessary business models to collect revenue at an optimized rate from the content.
The content is not high quality enough to earn enough revenue (e.g., bad videos get fewer views).
But I think there are some cases where you can get content created at a price that is lower than the revenue you will earn from publishing it.
Post-editing and post-production
Another question is how much post-editing or post-production is required.
Sometimes the delivery from the content creator needs zero editing and can be published as is.
Other times, in order to create the margin, you’ll need to add some additional value to the content.
For example, if you pay a content creator and they deliver a product that is 80% of the publish-ready product, you have to spend your own time finishing the last 20%.
For example, having a Fiverr create slides for you, and then you create the videos where you screen share the slides and then make a course.
These margins are not new
These margins in the content market are not new. Some classic examples:
Ghostwriter writes a book that earns more revenue when published under someone else’s name and brand.
Newspapers and magazines paying writers and designers less than the owners collect from ad revenue.
But there are new margins thanks to AI and globalization
But now there are even more margin opportunities in the content market because content creation has gotten so easy and fast.
The obvious factor that has caused this is AI.
The other factor is international arbitrage. Content creators are cheaper in certain international markets.
But here’s the really interesting thing I’ve been seeing that I think is still in the very early innings: content creators in cheap international markets using AI.
The problem with cheap content creation sometimes is that the quality isn’t high enough.
But now you have AI filling in that quality gap.
How to find these margins
Here are the main challenges with finding these margins and earning the value:
Finding content creators that are both cheap and high-quality.
Creating the business models where you can fetch the highest possible revenue from your content (often this just means building a brand and publishing on the right platforms).