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Is Social Media "Oversaturated"?

Hopefully anyone reading this can use my conviction to take them off the scary ledge, to act on their urge to create good content, instead of being held back by the premise that social media is oversaturated.

Ever wonder if a niche is too saturated for you to build a platform on on social media? I used to think this, too, but then I had an epiphany some months ago which I'll attempt to explain here.

More Eyeballs = More $$

But first - let's level set on assumptions regarding 1) user behavior, and 2) platform incentives

User Behavior: There's something known as the "90-10-1" theory that describes user behavior on social media, where (roughly):

  • 90% of users only consume content
  • 10% engage, and
  • 1% create the content that drives the platform.

Platform Incentives: Broadly speaking, what social platforms care about more than ANYTHING else with respect to metrics they're consistently optimizing for:

  1. Frequency: # Daily Active Users, Monthly Active Users, etc.
  2. Duration: Time spent on the app
  3. Advertiser Spend:

If they can move the needle up on any of these - ideally all - over time at a faster rate than their competitors, they win. Simple. More eyeballs (frequency & duration) = more $$ (ad spend). But how can social platforms increase users and viewers?

Platforms can improve their personalization algorithms to show users more relevant content. They've been doing this for well over a decade by now and they're clearly effective, even if users claim to hate it. But algorithmic personalization on uber large platforms can only go so far to optimize metrics as there is personalized content available. So, the secret fourth metric here, is volume of user-generated content.

Platforms Critically Rely on UGC

How can platforms move the needle given all content is user-generated content? Simple: by incentivizing the act of content creation. Which could mean:

  1. Incentivizing existing creators to create more content, or
  2. Converting more viewers -> creators

Re: #1 - it's common knowledge now that higher volume (of created content) tends to correlate with improved creator/influencer performance on a platform. As is #2 - paying for UGC is also commonplace today. But increasing the volume of content alone doesn't guarantee precision in terms of supplying users with content they demand such that they'll remain on the app for longer, or visit it more often. Why not?

Quality > Quantity
Every user pays a non-trivial labor "tax" when they use a platform in the form of scrolling and searching for content they like. I call this a "tax" because it’s literally labor on the part of the user, even if it's also designed to benefit the user as a consumer. Increasing the volume of LOW quality content will “increase” this tax. If it gets too high, then you have users closing the app or going somewhere else, which is a platform’s worst nightmare.

We - as users - obviously hate low effort "AI slop". What happens when we hate it? We turn it off, we close the app, we stop scrolling or following new profiles, so it’s damaging for platforms to have an abundance of shit content. Plus, I'm sure it does a double-fault here by adding noise to targeting advertising systems.

So QUANTITY without QUALITY or RELEVANCE is crippling for social media platforms. Therefore, improving quality and relevance of content effectively reduces this tax, becoming a win win for everyone:

  • Users find more content they like ->
  • Users spend more time on the platform ->
  • Platforms gain leverage charging advertisers a premium->
  • Advertisers get more value from advertising since they get more 'targeted' eyeballs ->
  • Creators are paid more by the platform for their content.

But what if volume isn't the issue after all?
One might argue that the supply of social media content grown far faster than our finite amount of time and attention, therefore volume isn't a concern. This perspective is flawed for a few reasons:

1. First, I think we are biased to underestimate how few people are creating high quality content, because we mistake repetition for abundance. Because a small minority of creators account for a disproportionate share of impressions, our feeds are terrible representations of the actual creator population. Remember the 90-10-1 rule: the 1% doesn’t represent HIGH QUALITY content, it just represents content created, period. So high quality content in any GIVEN niche is only some percentage OF that 1%!!!

2. Second, the turnover rate of the top creators within any content niche is higher than we think, because success increases their constraint. Just like musicians, creators are under pressure to continue increasing production value, larger audiences are less forgiving of creators’ experimentation, audiences tend to get burnt out, and other opportunities arise that may have better ROI and long term sustainability.

3. Finally, content niches aren’t static; they’re constantly changing, evolving, being born and dying. Content niches are a point in time reflection of what people are organically interested in or engaging in, but on a global scale.

Another Interesting Dynamic to Consider

Platforms NEED the creator economy to continue to grow both for near term profitability and to achieve a higher level vision.

Social media platforms - Video-based ones in particular - are betting on short form video to continue to transform the core nature of how we communicate online, well into the future. To the point that this is as common to us as google search or email was to the internet in the early 2000’s. They're predicting that there are still more users to convert into creators, and more time to capture from existing users that are probably spending ample amounts of internet time elsewhere.

Hypothetically, it IS proabaly "okay" if more slop is introduced in the platform ecosystem, as long as the impact of the higher quality content is greater than that of the SLOP as far as user count and time spent metrics go. But I tend to think that this is only a temporary gain that eventually leads to platform downfall, in the same way that Google search suffers from SEO slop and is only really used for their AI overviews.

A few words on the 90-10-1 "rule":
The 90-10-1 / rule describes how activity distributes itself on social and publishing platforms. Tldr;

90% — The Silent Majority (Consumers / Lurkers)

  • These users read, watch, scroll, etc.
  • They are the suppliers of ATTENTION in the platform economy.

9–10% — The Reactors (Engagers / Amplifiers)

  • This group comments, likes, shares, and occasionally posts.
  • They shape tone, feedback loops, and virality, but rarely originate sustained bodies of work.
  • These users supply MOMENTUM.

~1% — The Producers (Creators / Publishers)

  • This sliver creates original material consistently: essays, videos, tools, research, memes, frameworks.
  • Every platform’s culture, narrative, and knowledge base is disproportionately authored by this group, so this group supplies the MEANING of content online.

Here's my hunch on why the gap between the creators and 'everyone else' is so dramatic, and why I believe this pattern is universal, if not at least why it transcends coincidence/correlation:

  1. First, consuming content is safe, but content creation is risky - it invites judgment and scrutiny, and for many of us, it feels like a permanent representation of our reputation as humans. So even if people have the time and knowledge to create, fear will prevent them from doing so.
  2. Second, creating good content clearly requires a ton of time, energy, skills and knowledge. Millions of people who would otherwise do well on social media never will because they don’t have one or more of these things.
  3. Then there’s persistence, which puts pressure on the 4 criteria above: most creators need to keep at it for months or years with little indication of whether they’ll be rewarded by the algorithm.