If you follow anyone for a long enough time period, you will notice the same content be repeated every now and again. Your favorite authors, the news, musical genres, and long running tv series do this. Eventually, I'll start repeating old stuff that I've written before.
Why does this happen? Well, I guess that new content is always demanded to make more money and creative thoughts can't really be produced on demand. Being creative doesn't work like that. And, like the Call of Duty series, if something is making money, keep doing it to safely make more money rather than try something new. If people keep demanding the same stuff, that stuff is probably still good.
There is also the concept of cyclical audiences. The best example of this is, that I can think of, is the anime Pokemon. The series has gone on for several hundred episodes and shows no real sign of stopping. I remember first watching it on tv every Saturday as a little kid and I stuck with it loyally for a few years. But then, it started getting really stale and repetitive and I started watching something else. A few months ago, I watched a youtube video by a girl named Tamoshii explaining why the phenomena occurs.
The cartoon's main demographic is kids 8 to 14 years old and when a current batch of children get sick of watching Pokemon, the children that were 4 to 6 years old are now 8 to 14 years old and Nintendo has a constant audience to make money off of. It is for this reason that Ash Ketchum is always in some new region collecting 8 gym badges to challenge the Elite 4 and become a champion. It is for this reason that Ash and his partners will always acquire the 3 starter pokemon of each generation so young kids will always identify with Ash no matter which starter they chose. It is for this reason that Ash will forever remain 10 years old and never age.
It is for this reason that almost every form of media will eventually repeat itself and recycle the same content. Just think about how many times the most popular movies get squeals or remakes. One reason I'll never go out of my way to see a superhero movie is that it is just the hero's journey retold.
Recycled content isn't necessarily bad. If it feels like something is starting to get stale, that is just a sign to try something new or explore something else.
Once we have about 200 posts in our back catalogue we can do the same. Our initial readers no longer identify with us because we are not writing about being poor. We are writing about being rich.
ReplyDeleteOf course we may hope to bring our poor readers along with us so that they too can identify with a rich man- but only a minority will do so even though the door is open.
There is also the question of happyness. People who are fully content have little need of self improvement blogs so we lose even the successful readers.
One answer is to recycle old content. Polish it up and republish.