Content Creation Is Broken: Here’s What GaryVee Says Works

What Gary Vaynerchuk's latest conversation reveals about attention, AI, and acting like a media company

Gary Vaynerchuk has built a career on saying the uncomfortable thing a few years before everyone else catches up to it. In a recent conversation on Sammi Cohen’s podcast, he turned that instinct toward a blunt diagnosis: a lot of founders and brands are still approaching content creation the wrong way, chasing signals that stopped mattering years ago.

That might sting if you’ve spent the last year polishing a handful of “perfect” posts a month. But it’s also, oddly, good news. If the old rules are broken, there’s room for smaller, scrappier teams to win attention away from bigger ones — if they understand what actually moved.

Why Interest Beats Followers Now

For most of the last decade, growth meant one thing: get more followers, then sell to the audience you built. Vaynerchuk’s point cuts against that logic. On platforms built around recommendation feeds — think TikTok, Reels, Shorts — the algorithm doesn’t ask who follows you. It asks who’s interested in what you just posted, right now, regardless of whether they’ve ever heard of your brand.

That’s a structural shift, not a trend. A seven-person startup with zero existing audience can out-distribute a company with 200,000 followers, simply because the content matched what someone was curious about in that moment. For founders without a marketing budget, that’s the opening worth paying attention to.

Followers tell you who already found you. Interest tells you who’s about to.

What this means day to day

In practice, it means judging a post by whether it earns attention on its own merits — not by how big your account already is. Topic, hook, and timing matter more than audience size. That’s harder to plan for than “post three times a week,” but it’s also more honest about how discovery actually works today.

AI Is Changing What Content Creation Even Means

The conversation also dug into how artificial intelligence is reshaping the mechanics of content creation — not replacing judgment, but collapsing the time between having an idea and having something publishable. Editing, captioning, and repurposing a single idea into a dozen formats: work that used to take a team now takes one person and a laptop.

That speed cuts both ways. It’s also why platforms are racing to answer a harder question: how do you tell what’s real? Google’s push to label AI-generated content with SynthID is one sign of how seriously that problem is being taken — and a reminder that speed without a point of view just adds to the noise. Not everyone agrees the pace is even sustainable: some of the field’s own leading voices have called for an AI slowdown rather than an all-out sprint.

Quantity Is a Competitive Advantage — If You Can Sustain It

This is where Vaynerchuk’s long-standing argument resurfaces: publishing more, not less, is often the real advantage — provided the volume doesn’t come at the cost of an actual point of view. More attempts mean more chances to land on the idea, format, or moment that resonates. For a founder with limited time, that argues for documenting the business as it happens rather than waiting for a polished campaign.

The catch is that “more” only works if the underlying tools and knowledge keep up. AI coding agents are a useful parallel here: they’re powerful, but they go stale fast, which is why so many now lean on live search instead of a fixed knowledge cutoff to stay current. Content strategy has the same problem — a playbook that worked six months ago can quietly stop working, and nobody sends a memo when it does.

Every Brand Needs to Think Like a Media Company

Perhaps the clearest throughline in the conversation was this: brands that still treat content as an occasional marketing task are already behind. The ones winning attention treat their own channels the way a publisher treats a newsroom — consistent output, a recognizable voice, and a willingness to cover the unglamorous parts of the business, not just the launches.

If your brand isn’t publishing, someone else is publishing the story for you.

That reframing matters most for small and mid-sized companies. A media company doesn’t need a huge headcount to exist — it needs a rhythm. Weekly behind-the-scenes posts, founder commentary, customer stories: these are “media,” even if nobody on the team has that title.

Beyond the Feed: Staying Relevant as Everything Changes

The discussion widened beyond tactics into something more personal — happiness, motivation, and what it actually takes to keep building when the ground keeps shifting. Vaynerchuk’s own career is something of a case study: alongside VaynerMedia, he’s spent recent years building VeeFriends, an entirely different kind of business built on characters, storytelling, and live commerce rather than advertising.

The common thread is comfort with reinvention. Live shopping, new platforms, new formats — none of it stays still long enough to master once and move on. The founders who stay relevant aren’t the ones who found the one tactic that works forever; they’re the ones who kept paying attention after the first thing stopped working.

What Founders Can Take From This

Strip away the specifics and a few practical takeaways remain. Stop measuring content by follower count — measure it by whether it earned attention on its own. Treat AI as a tool for speed, not a replacement for a point of view, and stay alert to how fast those tools themselves keep changing. Publish more often, not less, as long as each piece still says something real. And accept that there’s no final version of a content creation strategy — only the next one, built on what you just learned.

That’s a less comfortable message than “find your niche and stick to it.” But for founders willing to treat every post as a small experiment rather than a finished product, it’s also a far more honest map of how attention actually works right now.

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Sources

• GaryVee: You Might Be Making Content Completely Wrong — Conversation hosted by Sammi Cohen covering content strategy, AI, and brand building