Matt Yglesias and the Secret of Blogging

But the key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity.

This understanding of publishing, which suggests that rough-and-ready, quasi-automatic writing done on a regular, frequent schedule is ultimately more financially sustainable than refined and thoughtful writing published when necessary and appropriate, can seem counterintuitive, if not unbelievably cynical and depressing.

this demand is so insatiable that there is currently no real economic punishment for content overproduction. You will almost never lose money, followers, attention, or reach simply from posting too much.

But the Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting. You might lose a small handful of subscribers or followers if you overwhelm their inbox, or write an egregiously bad post -- but on balance yo