On May 6th, 1835, from a cellar in downtown New York, James Gordon Bennett Sr. published the first-ever stock report based on information he’d gathered on Wall Street.
His brand new one-page paper was called The New York Herald, and it would change the content we consume forever.
When you think of old-time paperboys yelling, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it,” you’re thinking of Bennett’s work. He pioneered the so-called Extra edition, wherein papers would print more than once a day, updating stories as news unfolded.
He’s also widely considered to be the first person ever to publish an interview. If you can imagine that – it simply hadn’t been done before.
He invented the society column. He invented the stock sheet. He was the first publisher in America to be granted an exclusive interview with a sitting president, and the first to employ a European press corps, bringing unparalleled news from Europe.
During the civil war, he pioneered the use of maps to show troop movements – something we largely take for granted now.
He also had his reporters pour over southern newspapers, tallying up any mention of rebel troops or positions.
“The resulting list was, when published, so accurate and comprehensive that the Confederate war command arrested several clerks at its Richmond headquarters, on the assumption they had leaked secret documents.”
All this wasn’t easy. These were the knock-down drag-out days of early New York media, and his opponents did a lot to try and keep him down.
Publishers boycotted any newsstand that did business with him (sound familiar?)
They refused money from companies advertising with him. On his honeymoon, they conspired to try and have his travel plans cancelled. Then later, worked hard to spread the rumor his son was a bastard.
Enemies even beat him up on the street in broad daylight (including, in one noteworthy instance, a candidate for district attorney whom his paper had put down).
None of it worked. Through his voice, and his innovative storytelling, Bennett had won the support of the people. He could speak directly to them. And they would not let The Herald fail.
“I never wish to be a day in advance of the people,” he apparently said.
Maybe not, but he sprinted ahead of his competitors.
By 1865, as he neared retirement, revenue had climbed to $1 million per year, which was as much as the next five competitors combined.
When his son took over, it would be America’s most profitable paper, and eventually afford the junior Bennett two Parisian townhouses, an 1,800-acre estate in Versailles with a palace on the grounds, a shooting estate in Scotland, a villa in Beaulieu-sur-mer with four private chefs, and a 314 foot yacht with three private staterooms just for him, each rumored to house a different mistress.
Oh… And a townhouse in Manhattan, a mansion on 182nd street, a country club estate in Newport, and of course, The Herald building itself.
It was, in short, very, very, very profitable to be good at capturing the attention of the masses. And the key to that seems to be a continual focus on innovating content.
All of this is chronicled well in a book I picked up recently, Battle of Ink and Ice.
The main storyline is about a historic dispute over who reached the North Pole first.
But it’s set against the backdrop of the newspaper wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and for the last few weeks, it’s had me thinking a lot about content innovation, and whether we can lay down any firm rules on how to do that.
So far, I think I’ve found four…
I.
Sahil Bloom was the first person I ever noticed purposefully testing new content formats. Maybe you’ve seen it too – he tries different things, some catch on, then he repeats those (often with further small tweaks).
Eventually, the world catches on, and people start copying.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with recycling formats that seem to be working for other people. I’ve done it myself. BUT it’s important to realize the limitations.
I’ve never seen anyone get as big or bigger than Sahil by repurposing his hooks, and that suggests something interesting – that content formats are subject to the same “law of shitty clickthroughs” as ads.
If you don’t know the law of shitty clickthroughs, it basically says that people respond to novelty until the novelty wears off. A new ad format grabs attention, driving all sorts of traffic and clicks and buzz. Competitors copy it. And over time, people get used to it, and learn to tune it out.
It’s one reason growth teams are constantly experimenting with new ideas.
One issue with copying what’s working for other people is that by default, you’re joining further along the curve and get less time before the idea stops working.
But much more importantly, if you only copy others, you don’t form opinions about why something is working and what else might work. You’re reliant on others to keep your growth engine going.
It’s also hard to build a position as a leader if your audience notices that you’re always following someone else.
So the first rule I can see of content innovation is that you generally want to be at the front of the curve, trying new things. That will help you wring the most out of formats that hit, but it will also help you develop an opinion of your own around what to try, and that’s the most valuable part.
II.
Okay, so we agree that we should be “innovating” but what the hell does that actually mean?
Well, I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean you need to be completely unique, with never-before-seen ideas, and it doesn’t mean you need to be a million times better than everyone else. Trying for either of those is more likely to stall you rather than help you.
Instead, the winning formula seems to be “a little better, and a little different.”
This is where Mr Beast comes in. In his interview with Joe Rogan he talks about the exponential rewards that can come from small improvements in content:
If you get people to click your video 10% more, and watch your video 10% longer than mine, you don’t get 10% more views, you get like four times the views. You have to think exponentially.
Mr Beast
It can be hard to look at the small tweaks someone like Sahil makes – moving a semicolon here, changing a thumbnail, trying a different video title – and feel like that’s a valuable use of time.
That is, until you truly internalize the idea that small improvements can unleash enormous gains. A bit more engagement sends a signal to the algorithm that more people should see your stuff, and that snowballs.
But it’s not just about the algorithm. (Blegh, I hate the way we talk about that)
When you’re a little bit different, you’re no longer competing with everyone else. This again is why it’s better to be at the front of the innovation curve rather than further along it.
And when your stuff is a little better than what came before – a little more detailed, perhaps, or a little easier to read, a little more fun, etc. – you give the audience something to get excited about. And word of mouth will always be the most powerful algorithm out there.
III.
I swear this isn’t going to become the Sahil-Bloom-fanclub newsletter. But there’s one other important lesson I take from his recent work that I think is worth sharing.
These days, the main place I see him testing stuff is on Youtube.
He’s relatively new to the platform. At the time of this writing, his oldest video was posted just ~2 months ago.
I want you to pay attention to these view counts.
When he joined Youtube, he had over a million Twitter followers. An average tweet from him gets hundreds of thousands of views – often millions – and his newsletter list is 700k+ strong.
But on Youtube, he’s the new kid on the block.
Imagine that for a second.
Think about how hard it’d be to go thousands of likes and shares every day, to a few hundred views total. That ability – to ignore your ego while moving into new arenas – seems important to what we’re talking about here.
My prediction is that within a year, Youtube will be his biggest audience. But you can’t get that kind of growth unless you’re willing to repeatedly go back to basics.
In their book, Dual Transformation, the authors use the metaphor of a mountain range.
When you dominate a space, you stand atop a hill, and from up there, every other path looks like it heads down.
But there are bigger mountains than the one you’re standing on – emerging trends and competitors that will one day surpass you. If you’re not willing to at least put one foot on another hill, you’ll eventually become obsolete.
You have to be willing to go downhill in order to get higher.
Naval Ravikant put it similarly once. “When you look at the greatest artists and creators,” he said, “they have this ability to start over that nobody else does.”
IV.
I want to close this out by looking at Tim Ferriss for a second. I think he’s a fascinating person to learn from for two reasons:
- He’s stayed relevant for almost 20 years now, and…
- He tests a lot
If you know of Tim, you probably think of him as either a podcast host or author of The 4-Hour Workweek. But I’ve been following him since 2008, and he’s tried so many things in that time. To name just a few:
- Ran one of the world’s top 100 blogs
- Filmed 3 different TV series
- Trialed a membership format
- Trialed a monthly box-club
- Runs a newsletter with 2m+ subscribers
- TED and SXSW speaker
- Wrote 5 books – including an NFT project called Cockpunch 😂
- Launched a fiction podcast series for Cockpunch
- Built apps for 4-Hour Body and Slow Carb Diet
- Co-founded largest psychedelic research center in the world
- The Tim Ferriss Book Club produces audio versions of famous books from other authors
Even within each of those things, he tests a lot of different formats, like his recent walk & talk interview with Greg McKeown (which I think podcasters will adopt en-masse as soon as someone figures out the tech to make it easy).
But most know him for just one or two things.
The lesson here is that over the course of your career, you’ll try a lot. Some of it will fail, a decent amount will be successful, and then a few things will be so overwhelmingly successful that they eclipse all your other work in people’s minds.
We don’t control what we’re remembered for. All we can control is what we put out into the world, and the effort that goes into making it better and different than what came before.