The Efficient Slop Market

A few weeks ago I sat on a panel with Adam Aleksic (the Etymology Nerd), Legendary Jay, and a few other creator friends to discuss AI, Authenticity, and the Slop Problem. The moderator opened by asking each of us to define “slop.” An innocuous ask, until I remembered I was sitting next to Adam, who has literally built his career “exploring the origins of words, particularly neologisms and slang as it exists within digital culture.” Perfect. With each passing minute the conversation got more heated, and the audience sat up a little straighter in their seats. Needless to say, it was tense.

But what struck me most about the palpable fear on the panel and in the room was that the panic didn’t necessarily feel wrong, just sort of incomplete. When my turn came to take the mic, I tried to explain (perhaps poorly, in the moment) that we are simply watching one phase of a market cycle and mistaking it for the end state. My hunch is that right now we are in a volume/engagement-efficient market, but will soon shift to a value/economic-efficient one. Let me explain.

AI has collapsed the cost and friction barriers to content creation and in turn, supply has come online in a big way. Marginal cost goes to zero, supply balloons. And the flood isn’t only pushed by cheap tools; it’s pulled by the distribution layer. The algorithm told us exactly what it wanted, and the internet obliged at scale. Adam actually highlighted this nuance on the panel and has a great piece on it called Slop Realism. You should read it, but his point is that every antidote to slop eventually gets consumed by the same machine that creates it. Taste, whimsy, authenticity, imperfections — all of it eventually becomes performance, optimized for the machine. He concludes that slop is a Moloch, a structure we're all forced to participate in (and a concept I, too, was unfamiliar with).

Adam is right… but everything he describes happens inside the engagement market, where the buyer is an algorithm and the currency is anchored in watch time, likes, comments, aesthetics. Therein, signals are costless to imitate, so every quality one eventually converges to the mean. And you end up with garbage.

But this slop market might be the closest thing to perfect competition the content world has ever seen: infinite suppliers, identical commodity products, zero barriers to entry. And under perfect competition, price gets pushed down to marginal cost. Which is, well, zero. What feels like a crisis may actually just be efficient price discovery happening to an entire industry at once. The mistake, and seemingly source of all the paralyzing fear, is assuming that's the only market there is.

Enter: the economic market. But first, some history. And shoutout to slop’s more intellectual cousin for helping me work this one out.

From Claude: "Demand Media flooded search with penny-per-article eHow content and rode it to a $1.5B IPO — until Google repriced quality and the whole model collapsed. BuzzFeed and the listicle economy flooded the social feed — until the platforms and advertisers repriced that too. Each wave follows the same arc: cost collapse → supply flood → panic → repricing → a premium tier emerges on the other side."

AI slop will likely follow the same pattern, but this time I don’t think the repricing happens inside the feed. Back then, Google killed content farms because slop threatened their business of high quality search results. Today, platforms have the opposite incentive. The feed monetizes impressions no matter what generates them. We’ve even seen the platforms try to vertically integrate slop (Meta's Vibes app, for example). So the companies that cleaned this up last time are now the ones selling the slop cannons. The calls are coming from inside the house.

This brings us to a market where humans, not algorithms, set prices directly, and in dollars. If the former is a volume market, this is a value market. Any commodity producer will tell you that perfect competition is a terrible place to make money. The only way out is differentiation the market can't replicate. In content, that moat is a person with unique ideas, perspectives, earned trust, and a reputation at stake, whose next thing you either buy or you don't.

This value market has always existed for creators, but I believe its growth will continue to accelerate, and not just on Patreon, Beehiiv, or Substack. Since early 2023, I’ve been yelling about how creators are increasingly competing with brands, converting fandom both on- and offline. Creator tour ticket sales grew ~5x last year (see: Jake Shane’s 36-stop live tour). Creator brands like Dairy Boy not only routinely sell out online but now command such offline frenzy, that the local towns housing their stores are rebelling. Hell, even billions in capital is being raised off of a widely shared investment memo. There is no prompt for this. And BTW it’s no coincidence that fandom is converting into cold hard dollars at the same time the feed is drowning in generated nonsense. Slop realism is driving the flight to economic realism.

To be clear, premium creators will continue to compete against slop for time and attention, and I don't think that's changing anytime soon. But I do think the role each plays will sharpen: serving different markets, at different price points, for different functions. Slop is a commodity, clearing at cost. Creators are brands, earning margin. So as the feed continues to serve infinite, cheap content, the trusted, community-denominated, high-converting creator only becomes scarcer. This is obviously the bet we are making at the Slow Creator Fund.

I'm sure the value market will get partially slopified too. AI creators will sell subscriptions; ghostwritten "founders" will launch communities. But the value market is good at pricing accountability. When a product or recommendation flops, a real person has to own it publicly, and their next launch likely pays for it. As our team likes to say, “there’s a throat to choke.” A slop account that burns you doesn't suffer, and it probably just respawns under a new name the following day. So slop can enter the value market, it just can't post collateral and, therefore, accrue trust.

Most interestingly, I predict we will continue to see more innovation in the economic infrastructure that rewards unique, useful, high-value creators and content. Direct monetization mechanisms for long-tail creators, creator equity structures, community platforms, just to name a few… there are companies working on these as we speak. These new models will let creators capture the value they generate in ways previously unreachable.

The panic assumes the market that exists today is the market we're stuck with. But markets always reprice — and while the cost of making content went to zero, the value of being someone people trust did not. So I guess, after all of this, I've landed on my definition: slop is just content without a warranty.

Thanks for reading,

Megan