I co-founded Isolated Nation at the same time that Facebook started to really establish itself as a multi-media platform, spreading videos, images, advertising and internet articles amongst that selfie of Jessica from high school with her dog, and that status Jono posted about selling his two origin tickets for $50 each. I can actually guarantee that I have really good friends who’ve never read more than a paragraph on this website. Hell, I can probably guarantee that there’s people who’ve written for us that will barely have read anything else on here but their own.

In 2017, written content is losing the war to videos, images and clickbait for our ever-valuable attention (thank you to the advertising world for funding this war). There’s a few core reasons that this is happening:

A lack of exposure of written content compared to alternatives.

Inconsistent quality of content turning people away.

A saturation of the poor quality and irrelevant content.

I’m using Isolated Nation as a case study really, and our specific issue is this:

How do you reach a significant number of people when you’re targeting such a small audience (Perth, 16-30 years old)? Then within that demographic, there’s only going to be a small subset of them that are interested in, say, the film Moonlight. Within that subset of people who are interested, an even smaller subset of those people will actually want to read someone else’s review – and then all of a sudden you realise your available audience is so much smaller than your original audience.

This problem, in and of itself, leads to a host of further issues – the primary one being that this consistently affects your ability to get your content to reach a wide audience. I, like most millennials (I’m actually Generation X but using the word millennials is really “in” right now), find and discover a lot of written content (and memes) on Facebook. It’s an unfortunate portrait of the times, but I rely on the few Facebook friends and pages that I haven’t unfollowed to find cool shit for me and share it, but the reality is that Facebook holds all the power through the use of its news feed sorting algorithm, EdgeRank. This got plenty of coverage during the recent outrage over how fake news dominated the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, and can be pretty succinctly explained. In short, the more people who are commenting, liking and sharing your shit, the more likely that it will reach more people. The consequence of this is that clickbait and memes will also reach more people because everyone will tag their mates to be like "hey, I laughed at this!" (The laughter was all internal). While the principle behind EdgeRank is fine, I do believe that at the end of the day, it ends up catering to the lowest common denominator, forcing generic memes and clickbait-esque content to the top of your news feed, in lieu of content that might be relevant and interesting to you. In the worst case it can become an echo chamber or as John Oliver put it, a ‘cesspool of nonsense’.

Of course, Facebook has no real motivation to change this – they make an astounding amount of money from the sale of advertising. You can literally pay money to force your content to show in people's news feeds, despite EdgeRank, or better yet, force it into that pesky ad sidebar. While I don’t want to delve too deep in to all of the reasons I simultaneously hate but can’t live without Facebook – this is a massive reason that online written content just can’t reach the audience that it could be interesting to. I’m certain that we’re not alone in this.