| The Abundance Era is what happens when content supply completely outpaces demand. When every idea has ten versions. When every format is optimized, templated, auto-generated, iterated before you even pick up your camera. When the distance between “I should make that” and “someone already did” collapses to just about zero,.
And I really think abundance, not algorithms, not platforms, not ai, is the single greatest threat to the individual creator today.
So How do you survive as a creator through the abundance era?
I think the answer boils down to 4 principles of being a creator in 2026:
1 - Honesty over strategy
I think we have conflated creativity and strategy quite a bit.
Strategy is those quantitative metrics like views, subscribers, sponsorship revenue and AdSense. Hitting those metrics is a dopamine hit and just a little more fun and a little bit easier to wrap your head around. Once you make a strategic video and it works… you want to do it again. Example of a strategic video.
Honesty means writing what’s true instead of what’s most strategic. Honest creative work is irrational. Slow. Often invisible. It’s the thing you want to say before you know how it performs.
Making creative, honest work is a very open-ended prompt - and amazing work comes from it, but 90% of the time nothing comes from it.
Any video that is strategically obvious will get made. Probably already has. By someone or something faster, cheaper, or more optimized. The more you lean into pure strategy, the more you converge with everything else on the internet.
Which only leaves one viable path. You have to ask a different question. Instead of “will this work?” you have to ask “is this true to me?”
What do you actually have to say?
Because when everything is being made, the only scarce input left is sincerity. Perspective. Lived specificity. The thing only you can articulate in the way only you can articulate it.
A lot of ideas we’re sharing fit into the honesty bucket. Like our end of year video, or even this most recent one about the Abundance era. These are by no means our top performing videos. In fact this recent episode is not performing that well when it comes to views.
But, we got a lot of texts, tweets and calls about it. People wanting to engage in the conversation, people saying it struck a chord with them. This concept of abundance has been something I've been writing about, and thinking about for weeks. I just really wanted to say it. And I'm grateful for the people who want to watch.
2 - The audience is the boss
I just can’t stress enough how important it is in the abundance era to go back to one of the 3 rules of YouTube: respect your audience’s time.
They have so much content to choose from that the idea of someone watching your video on any given day is a small miracle. If you have the honor of having someone there - you have to respect their time.
It’s a really hard, weird balance to strike of both creating content that’s honest and true to you but also content your audience is responding to. But most of the time if you are sharing something honest, the audience can feel that (and vice versa).
More important than anything, your product as a creator is trust with your audience. Just remember that the audience are the only ones who can truly fire you. Without them, you don’t have a job.
3 - Make writing a daily practice
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” - Linus Pauling.
That’s a real quote from a scientist. Plain and simple, if you are a creator, you are in the business of ideas. You have to write down your ideas, explore them and see what’s there. Most of them will be bad, that is the purpose of writing. As Ed Sheeran says “get out the sh*t.”
I guarantee you if you write every day, you will get better at writing ideas. Titles, Thumbnails, Hooks, Concepts. It would be impossible not to. Most of the ideas you write will be bad. But a few will be good. And if nothing else, you will get really good at figuring out what is a bad idea + what is a good idea.
When we’re at our best, we’re writing 10 ideas a day. Can be just freewriting a page or a paragraph a day. Just start with anything. Writing will become your unfair advantage.
4 - Love the game
If you want to have a successful channel on YouTube, you have to just love YouTube. And if it’s not YouTube and it’s just making videos, well then Love making videos. You have to love opening up the timeline, placing music underneath a scene or montage.
It’s all too hard and too irrational to not love it.
There’s this great quote from our interview with Marques Brownlee where he compares YouTube to becoming a professional basketball player. He says something along the lines of:
“Everyone can have fun making videos and everyone can have fun playing basketball - but turning it into a job requires not just a high level of skill, but like an extra level of time and dedication.”
The point he’s getting at is: you know an athlete is going to be good if they go shoot hoops at the park in their spare time.
That’s just love for the game. And if you are going to make it through the Abundance era, you just have to love making videos.
By the way if you have some time this sunday, or a long drive this week I recorded an almost 3 hour conversation with Mark Brazil about a lot of these principles of being a creator in 2026. It was a rare occasion when i’m on the other side of the mic.
If you’re someone who enjoys deep conversations about YouTube and where the platform is going, I think you’ll enjoy it.
And if you have strong opinions on AI Slop go hang out in on the comments on this video - there’s a cool conversation over there I think you’ll enjoy.
Thanks for being here, See you next week.
- Samir
Oh wait… I need to announce the winner of our MacBook Pro Giveaway with ManyChat.
Thanks for almost 2,000 of you for entering into that via Instagram. We have randomly selected one winner and will be shipping you a brand new MacBook Pro
And that winner is…….
Wade Clark.
Congrats Wade, expect an email from us to coordinate the giveaway later today.
|
