 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here bringing you this video on a lovely June morning here in Jerusalem. The big news is that the YouTube channel has passed through the 700 subscriber mark, so I'm super excited about that. I love to see this YouTube channel slowly growing. It's a very, very obscure small channel in the broader scheme of things, but it's gratifying to me to see each 100 milestone past. I would say if you want to subscribe to this YouTube channel, subscribe using the regular and not the all feature because I do cover a whole boatload of assorted topics on this YouTube channel, and at least if you go for the subscribe, a smart subscribe feature, I don't know if there's a better word for it, YouTube will at least put its algorithm to work to try to get you more relevant recommendations so you won't be bombarded with content that you don't care So in just a time for the 700 mark, I wanted to do a video. This is a belief I have or a theory now. Everything people who don't just follow me online probably don't really get my personality. My personality is very tongue-in-cheek, sardonic, I think is a word, so I don't actually really want this to be called Rosal's theory of content agnosticism. I mean I would never be so brash as to name a theory after myself like doing that. I would at least let other people have the honor. But this is actually something I believe is going to be a long-term trend in content marketing. So if you're watching this video, yeah it's going to be about content marketing. If you don't care about content marketing, click away if it is something you're interested in. Here is a big, I would call this a big idea. This is kind of a big idea I have about the evolution of content marketing. And I tried to explain this before in a long-winded article and I'm going to do instead with a long-winded video. So there you go. So here's what I'm talking about. The ultimate direction of content marketing, this is my belief, is to shift towards a destination in which the format in which content is created is irrelevant. Here's what I mean by that. The way we create content today and usually content to the word I'm not in love with, but I will reluctantly say that in this context it kind of makes sense to use the word content. So we have writing, we have podcasting and then we also have video. Okay. And I'm going to put YouTube in brackets because when it comes to video distribution, ironically YouTube is actually kind of the only, ironically probably isn't the right word. YouTube is really the only game in town. I'd feel weird criticizing YouTube on YouTube because I actually think YouTube is incredible, but it definitely does have kind of a monopoly over the distribution of video. There are services like Vimeo and anyone can host their own video technically, but video is really big by today's standards of files. And if you compare this with the world, we have a podcasting where there's like a bunch of different podcast hosting platforms out there and writing in which pretty much anyone can set up a blog in their own site. So self hosting is very feasible or using one of the podcasting services. So it's more limited. Now the way content, if you think about this kind of shift we have today, right towards writing, okay, I'm going to put, whoops, I'm going to put up blogs here. It's kind of a natural evolution from the way content was created before people really talked about content. So we has print media like newspapers, right? And many years ago now people stopped really buying newspapers and it's all about the blogs. So CMSs came on the market and now we have witnessed a huge democratization of writing as a means of communicating with people because everyone pretty much these days can start at the blog. Ditto for podcasts and videos. I think this is a great thing, by the way. For podcasting, it's a predecessor really was radio, right? So we had radio stations broadcasting stuff and you'd listen to whatever the DJ was playing. And that was how people listen to content and inverted commas. And then we had television, right? And these have been succeeded, I would say, largely over the years or in the process of succession by these, we're seeing kind of a confluence of at the moment, I'm going to draw these guys down a little bit here. And I would regard this as an evolution, okay? Because we're not seeing mainstream media not engaging with these platforms with YouTube content creation, professional media and podcasting and writing. We're seeing professional media organizations you distributing their content through the same channels as amateurs like people like me who just do it for fun or whatever. So I do think we're actually seeing a replacement and this is the shift we're seeing across these three buckets. Now the thing is this, for your average Joe, your content consumer, let's take me, for instance, I'm going to give myself a different shade in this lovely, I'm really fond of this diagramming software, draw.io. Content consumer, content consumer is me, right? So let's say I care about a pretty niche subject, such as backup. And by the way, this is one of the major effects I think we've seen with the democratization of content, we've seen an explosion in content, because it's become so much easier to create content, right? We've seen a democrat democratization of the content creating process. And we've seen an increased long tail of content. So rather than having just a few kind of mainstream providers, because the buyers to entry were super high back then. We're now seeing pretty much everybody getting involved in some form of content creation, or not everyone, but a lot of people. And that's created a massive long tail of niche content creators. So if you have a content consumer like me, and I'm interested in the niche fields, like, let's take something I'm actually interested in backup, right? So nowadays, I kind of have an amazing array of content to care about. And it's almost overwhelming. I can subscribe to YouTube channels, where backup is a focus, I can talk, I can subscribe to podcasts, talk about backup. And I can subscribe to bloggers. Now the problem, or what I see the way that we have this set up at the moment currently, is that it's kind of mostly working in silo. So traditionally, you had print journalists and radio broadcasters and TV hosts. And for the most part, people didn't straddle across the spheres. And it's still kind of like that nowadays. It's not that YouTubers don't have podcasts, but typically people will do a podcast, or a YouTube channel, or they'll be a blogger. And so this creates for your average content consumer. They have to follow their favorite content creators across different channels, based on their context. And here's this is kind of my big idea. So we're what the phase we're at today, I call context driven content consumption. And let me explain what I mean by that. What I mean by that is that the way in which your average price and consumers content, whether they watch YouTube or podcast or read a blog for that matter, is dictated by the context they find themselves in. So in this sense, it's actually somewhat strangely, I would argue, video and writing are more closely allied than podcasting. When do you watch YouTube videos? People watch YouTube videos or streaming services. When they get back home from work and they're on their couch, I'm talking about recreational content consumption for the most part here. So that's when people watch YouTube podcasting. Now the difference between audio and video is that you can consume audio very easily while doing other things. And that's been also a big advantage of radio historically. So you can be exercising while listening to podcasts. You can't really be jogging for the most part if you're jogging outside while holding your tablet in front of you watching a YouTube channel, you could, but it would look ridiculous and it would be hazardous. So therefore when it's audio only content, people tend to engage with that best when the context they're doing is one in which their vision is required. So maybe they're commuting to work and maybe they're driving to work. So they'll be watching a podcast, maybe they are taking a bus to work in which case they don't need their visuals to be focused on the road. So in that case they'd watch a YouTube video and blogs, some people just prefer reading I think more than others, but you do, it's a visual aspect without any audio. So that's the difference in video and writing and when you think about it, right? Writing video content is moving images and audio and writing is just textual. Now within writing, we have a couple of things like graphics, graphics and infographics that's kind of subsumed within writing. So that's where we are today in terms of content consumption. And it doesn't really make sense when you think about it because people are not interested in, people really want to follow interesting content and content creators that resonate with them and that ideally like to, I would, this is my theory or my argument, they'd want to follow the same, they'd want to go from context driven content consumption to content driven content consumption, which I know is a bit of a sort of weird way consumption, right? So how do we get from one to two? And I would argue that we are getting there very quickly, naturally. So let me just kind of simplify this graph a little bit. So we're currently at context driven content consumption and we're moving towards content driven content consumption, where people follow, engage with content, not based upon the context, but based upon the person creating the content. Okay, so I'm going to get rid of these arrows. So what we need to get from A to B is what I call like connections between writing, podcasting and video. I'm going to use this little arrow, yoke, and put these guys up here because there's two. So there's connections between potential connections between writing and podcasting and audio distribution and connections between video and audio. And there's going to be finally a connection between video, sorry, between texts and video. Okay, this is getting a little bit messy, I'm just going to put it at the bottom. So how can we currently, if we're creating written content, how can we create a podcast from that? So the answer is in this direction, we have text to speech technology or speech synthesis technology. And this is already a kind of relatively fertile field, even though it's still fairly early stage, there are technologies, I've used a few of them that will allow you to feed in text, and a synthesized voice engine will make that available as a podcast. So we're going to see this in my prediction coming up soon. And we've already seen by the way, medium rolling this out as a feature by medium, I'm talking about medium.com, where you can listen to an article instead of reading it. So that's we're seeing a big move from connecting between this silo and this silo. TTS is going to get us from writing to podcasting, podcasting to writing. So that's on this site. And then on the bottom site, we're getting from here through auto transcription. So automatic transcription, like let's say rev, is working on the opposite direction of TTS. Text to speech or speech synthesis technology is taking writing and creating artificial audio from it, not generated by human. And when we are trying to take human originated audio and make it into machine and go to machine derived texts, that's the job of autumn auto transcription services, right? And these two fields, TTS and auto transcription are getting better all the time. So it's getting easier now for someone who's a writer to automatically have a podcast. And this is really what my theory is about. I'm saying that for the content creators of today, we're currently largely working in silos, the content creators of tomorrow are going to just create content and it's going to be automatically distributed across every possible format, allowing the content consumer of tomorrow to just plug into creators they're interested in and not, you know, not subscribed, not have their content preferences dictated by context as we as we kind of have today. So let's just finish this off getting from audio to video. So if you think about it, that's not really a technology that is really out there at the moment. However, we're seeing getting from writing to video, we're currently about halfway there. So I'm going to put images here as an intermediate stop. Now we already have an interesting AI that's getting a lot of tension at the moment. And it's called Dal E two. So we're seeing right now that we're getting halfway with Dal E two, we can type in something. And it'll give us an image. And then video is basically images that are moving. That's what differentiates between still images and video content. So we're eventually going to make the leap from writing to video. So if we started in writing, someone who writes a blog post, we have technology coming available to automatically generate a podcast. There's already that technology, it's just kind of rudimentary. And more rudimentary is a technology to say, okay, I'm going to write something, and we're going to auto generate an AI generated video. And what we need for that to happen is basically this Dal E two software to go for this suite of software, GAN software, AI generated software to go from generating images to generating videos, and perhaps sounds going to be somehow integrated to them. Now that's the evolution in this direction from video to sorry, from writing to video, the evolution, the other direction video to audio is actually very easy. I'm just going to draw an arrow here. We're using the underside for the move this way. Videos to audio is actually really easy because video is moving images and audio, right? So if I wanted to make this episode of my YouTube channel available as a podcast, I could simply extract the MP3 file and share that over a podcast hosting platform. The problem is that traditionally for no good reason, streaming platforms have made it difficult to do this. For instance, YouTube doesn't let you play a video in the background unless you're a premium subscriber. So I predict that that's going to change or content consumers are going to demand the background playing. Because what we currently have is a lot of ridiculous duplication in which podcasters, for podcasters to get onto video currently at this stage of the process, it's kind of a manual process. It doesn't make a lot of sense. What people will do is they'll take their podcast episode, they'll slap on some cover art, and they'll put a video. Now it's different if they're actually recording a video podcast, which is, you know, they actually record the video, and then they distribute via podcast and video. So they're doing two things there, but there's no real automatic way at the moment to flip from podcasting to a video, although it's really, really conceivable. There aren't products I'm aware of that I'll say, here's your, you know, here's your audio file, put in your still image, put out a video, and put it up on YouTube, right? But this can be automatic too. So it's currently manual, but really this could be 100% automatic. It's actually the video to audio gap is really the easiest one, automatic. But we're losing, if you will, we're getting less rich content because we have video and audio here, and now we're stripping out the visual layer to get back to podcasting. How do we get from audio to writing? So that's auto transcription. How do we get from video all the way back to writing directly, auto transcription also, because audio video is audio and moving images. So we just need to do, and there was already that by the way, video to blogs, Dali too. An example of this is YouTube auto captions. So when I record this, when I finished putting this recording this video, I put it up to YouTube after a period of time, YouTube's going to automatically put in captions, that process of getting better over time. And very soon we're going to be the point where the technology is there that we just extract, we go YouTube video, click to convert to blog post and AI is going to format it with headings, etc. We're already very close. So this is the way technology is going. And when I plotted it like this, the whole purpose of this video and exercise was to show that we're already pretty much there in terms of the technology needed to make content agnosticism. In reality, we just don't kind of have platforms right now that are doing this all automatically because the technology is still fairly early stage. If I write a blog to put a podcast out from that, it's going to be a manual process, right? I need to sign up for a speech synthesis engine, which are usually premium services, and I need to then create my podcast. So I need to do that by myself. If I want to convert my blogs into YouTube videos, that there's not really a tech that does that at the moment, but I predict there will be one very soon. We take our writing, we add speech synthesis, and then we use an engine like Dali to to pull in stock imagery or AI generated imagery that matches the content. And that's going to allow us to go from video to YouTube. So your average writer is going to become a videographer. And we're going to see YouTube content being a mixture of human originated video and AI originated video, much as podcasting nowadays, we have mostly human podcasts, but it's possible that we have AI podcast that is just a you started with a human writing a blog post, but then it's a completely synthetic voice in the podcast. So I know that's a totally wacky sort of video here. I feel a little bit like a mad professor on speed or something, even though it's seven in the morning and I'm recording this and I'm actually a little bit groggy still, but that's the way I see content evolving. And I think it's going to be a really good thing when we finally get there. And by getting there, I just mean a point where people don't have to figure out what I call these jumps between the various buckets. You're going to just push a button and convert your blog post into a new audio new podcast episode, new YouTube video, and you're having YouTubers going to push a button and they're going to spin out a podcast from that video and pull out a pull out a blog and auto posting medium or something like that. And when we get to this point at which the tech is fully mature for jumping between these three different buckets, we're going to reach a new evolution. We have this evolution that we had, you know, 10, 20 years ago from traditional print journalism to radio to television to their modern replacements, but we're still creating content in silos for the most part. And we're at a point now of context driven content consumption. And when all these technologies and basically it's AI that's going to make this happen, right? We're talking about artificial intelligence. Well, TTS isn't AI, but it's humans and technology working harmony to make all these gaps disappear. And then when we finally get to that point, your average content consumer is going to subscribe to a content creator. They're going to be available all the time and your preference of how you consume their content is not going to be dictated by context, but rather you're going to be subscribing to certain followers based upon how much their content resonates with you and how much you're engaged with it. So there you go. That's my theory of content agnosticism. This is how or maybe a better title for this video I'll go for is How I see content marketing evolving in 10 or 20 years or a short term. That's not quite as exciting as this little theory. But that's my big prediction for content marketing and how by the way can content creators leverage this? So I would encourage my clients and I don't really have clients at the moment. I'm really working for one client, but at the moment, while we're waiting for this technology to happen, people can get ahead of the game by doing this themselves, right? We have the technology to do a lot of this. If you're a writer, if you want to get if you want to take your writing and put videos up on YouTube with basic stock videos and TTS, there's nothing stopping you from doing that. If you're a YouTuber and you want to try to widen your audience through blogging, there's nothing stopping you from pulling out an auto generated YouTube transcript. Right now you're going to have to human as in you are going to have to format format it a little bit for text, because at the moment we're not quite at this point yet where we have perfect technology to make all these jumps. But I think we will in the near future. But while we're waiting for the technology to mature, people can I recommend that everyone uses the technology we have to do this process manually. And if you're currently putting out content on YouTube and also extracting that to a podcast, and finally extracting that to blogs, that's going to allow you to maximize your reach in our current context driven content consumption framework that is slowly going to give way to content driven content consumption. Anyway, if there is no other reason for this to make this video, it's that I can post this link in a few years and say, I told you guys, I told you guys. So that's my theory of content agnosticism. Hope this was interesting. Thank you guys for watching, listening or reading, because I'll post a link to this as a podcast and an article. And until the next video, thank you for watching.