Photo by: Grigorii Shcheglov on Unsplash

I wondered, as I belong to a faraway yesteryear generation, trying to catch up with the supersonic Gen Z.

And then, I searched and researched. I found the answer, the logic, and the way ahead for me in my endeavor as a ghostwriter.

As I expected, the term “content creators,” which we previously knew as writers, must have emerged after the advent of various platforms, viz. LinkedIn (2002), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), and Instagram (2010).

Before the advent of these platforms, writers worked as journalists, columnists, copywriters, bloggers, and technical writers. They were primarily working for newspapers, magazines, and publishers (like me).

Perhaps post-2010, things started changing.

SEO became a buzzword, and SEO-driven blogging became common. Companies and brands needed constant online writing. This is the beginning of the era when ‘writers’ became inputs to marketing funnels, and not authors.

Interesting! I thought. This was perhaps the first transformation of a writer. I was still a ‘writer’ then, and became a published author in 2019.

Then came the ‘Algorithms’, the almighty of monetization. It started rewarding frequency and not depth. The platforms, like LinkedIn and Medium, started prioritizing native posts. I learned native posts are content created and published directly on a platform in the format that platform prefers, instead of linking out to an external site.

Then, consistency became another buzzword, and writing became daily, snackable (a word used for content that can easily be consumed), and measurable.

This is perhaps when content replaced writing.

When I was busy publishing my Novella (2019), content writers became content creators, who were delegated with the task of conceiving, writing, formatting, and sometimes designing and distributing.

The term content creator became common on LinkedIn, a standard in hiring, and accepted in media. This was when writers lost a clear identity and had to embrace the new role of a content creator.

Nonetheless, many of my fellow authors are still adhering to the publishing arena. Many are doubling up as content creators as well.

What the writers lost in the process is authority, ownership, and intellectual status that a published author would have.

But what they gained in the process was visibility, independence, direct audience, and monetization options. Perhaps a trade-off and not a downgrade.

I took to ghostwriting as a trade-off, and I’m happy.