The Quality vs. Quantity Debate

TL;DR:

In the vlog era of YouTube, the algorithm rewarded consistency. Casey Neistat and other daily uploaders benefitted massively by being consistent. YouTube was looking for more content, and the creators of that time gave YouTube what it wanted.

Then a new problem arose.

With everyone making content daily, there was an insane amount of content available and it was getting harder and harder to determine which content was actually good.

YouTube’s algorithm shifted to focus more on average view duration - how long were people actually watching your content. The more people watched your stuff, the more you got pushed out.

Now I’m not a expert on the YouTube algorithm, but you can clearly see the shift of the biggest creators on the platform from vloggers to the once a month crazy uploaders like MrBeast and Mark Rober.

Mark Rober consistently gets over 20 million views on his videos - and he only makes 10 videos per year. He’s focused on quality.

MrBeast also posts on his main channel about once a month, and he just bought a sponsor slot for the Charlotte Hornets - so clearly he’s doing something right.

One of the stories that comes to mind when discussing the quantity vs quality debate is the story of the ceramics teacher who split the class into two sections and gave half the students the task to build one pot that is the best quality and the other half was supposed to build 50 pots - not worrying about quality just had to get to 50.

At the end of the class when it was time to grade the students, turns out the ones that were focused on quantity actually ended up making the better pots. They weren’t so concerned with making the best pot possible, they just made a pot, learned from their mistakes and then made another pot. They kept iterating and improving while the other group stayed theorizing.

But what if you have trouble even getting started?

Jerry Seinfeld is one of the most succesful comedians of recent times, if not all time. His show, Seinfeld, has won several awards including the top TV episode of all time awarded by TV Guide.

After the final season of his show, NBC offered Seinfeld $100 million for 20 more episodes - $5 million per episode! To this day (2023) its estimated that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld) make between $40 million and $60 million every year just on royalties from the show.

Jerry’s quality for comedic writing is undisputed, but how did he get there? Jerry would write every single day. He advises new comedians to get a year-long calendar and every day that they successfully complete the task of writing for the day you put a big X on the day in the calendar. After a few days you’ll have a chain of Xs and at that point, your goal becomes not to break the chain.

I’ve tried this myself and its super motivating to just focus on putting an X on every day and not necessarily worrying about results. Just focus on putting in the work and improving every day. As Bill Walsh says: The score takes care of itself.

We covered this concept in depth in our newsletter, but the premise is that your rate of compounding is increased exponentially simply by increasing the number of times you’re shipping.

Let’s say we have two newsletters that both start with 1000 subscribers and one posts once a week and the other posts 5 times a week and we assume that with each publish the newsletter gets 1% better and subsequently grows the audience 1% as well. After 30 weeks the 5x a week newsletter has gotten 312% better while the once a week newsletter has gotten 33% better. Not even close!

Coming back to our main discussion, the key thing to note is that the easiest path to get to quality is through quantity. The more you do, the more you find ways you can improve and iterate. When we put out our first video essay on BMW’s Beaver tooth grille, we thought our script was really good.

It was only after we put the final product up and were able to see the reactions from people that we realized we had a lot of opportunity to trim fat where people were losing interest. If we had just stayed in the script and theorized about how to make it better, we wouldn’t have gotten those signals from people and we wouldn’t know how to improve.

Its important to treat whatever your craft is like a marathon and not a sprint. You don’t want to be a one hit wonder, you want to aim to be prolific. That requires a real commitment to the craft.

In the beginning of your journey you need to get as much feedback as possible so you can make as good of a product as possible. Once you get an idea of what good looks like, you can scale back the amount of things your shipping out and put your energy into bigger projects that take more time like MrBeast and Mark Rober.

It doesn’t matter what field you’re in, whether its pottery, code, construction, content creation, or something else the principle still remains: quantity breeds quality.