You can either buy attention or earn it

Press cycles about million-dollar fund-raises and billion-dollar valuations are short-lived and targeted at aspiring entrepreneurs, not people like your customers. Building your audience that way doesn’t work, because a months-old startup has nothing to say, besides that a few rich people gave them some money. Trust me, I know.

Once you go viral, the temptation is to decipher the formula for how to do it again. Unfortunately, what’s interesting is not always popular. Furthermore, trying to manufacture virality is a surefire way to create saccharine writing and, eventually, cull your own creative vision. Too often, I think we sacrifice slow, chewy art for attention. 

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There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything

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Content is the product when your audience, not advertisers, are your customers. Without a great product, you’re not going to sell much.