Bad Content Drives Out Good: Gresham’s Law in the Age of Content Overflow

The content market is flooded with bad stuff. Unverified falsehoods circulate as fact. Valueless mass-produced filler clogs every feed. Stolen work spreads farther than the original. Outrage and rage-bait vacuum up attention.

This is usually where the lament begins — the age of depth is over, and so on. I suspect the opposite. Good content isn’t disappearing. It only looks like it’s disappearing, buried under the bad. And buried is a very different thing from gone.

An old economic law turns out to explain this difference surprisingly well. Bad money drives out good.

Why Bad Content Wins

In the centuries when coins derived their value from the metal inside them, counterfeiters would shave the edges off perfectly good coins, skim the silver, mix in cheap copper, and stamp new coins at the same face value. Since the debased coin spent just as easily as the real one, everyone hoarded the good coins and spent the bad ones. The market ended up filled with copper-laced junk. Thomas Gresham observed this in the 16th century, and the core insight is simple: bad money is cheap to make. Skip the silver, mix in base metal, done.

The line between good and bad content isn’t about length. It’s about whether the cost was paid. Real thought costs time, effort, and verification. Bad content skips that cost and takes only the output — printing plausible falsehoods, mass-producing with AI, copy-pasting someone else’s work, baiting with outrage. The forms vary. The trick is always the same: hollow out the inside, keep the face value.

Short-form is the perfect stage for this trick. When bad content goes short-form, production cost drops exponentially again. A one-line subtitle over stolen footage is cheaper than writing a full fake article. A 30-second clip ripped from someone’s documentary is cheaper than plagiarizing the whole thing. Add AI and the cost approaches zero. The same debased coin, but now infinitely reproducible. For someone in the business of shaving coins, there has never been a better market.

But cheapness alone isn’t enough. For cheap fakes to take over a market, one more condition is needed: buyers can’t tell real from fake before they buy. This is what economist George Akerlof showed with used cars — his “Market for Lemons.” When you can’t distinguish a good car from a wreck before purchase, the market eventually fills with wrecks.

Content is exactly that market. A title and thumbnail tell you nothing about whether the substance is deep or shallow. You have to click and consume to find out. And the time available for that judgment keeps shrinking — Microsoft measured that average time spent on a single screen dropped from 2 minutes 30 seconds in 2004 to 7 seconds by 2023. How do you separate real from fake in 7 seconds? You don’t. So good content and bad content compete at the same price: one swipe. Clickbait is coin-shaving for the attention economy — inflate the promise, gut the substance.

Content is actually worse than used cars. A lemon eventually reveals itself — something breaks, the engine sputters. But shallow content? You read it, and you feel like you learned something. Whether that feeling is real or an illusion doesn’t become clear until you cross-reference against other sources. And shallow content gives you just enough of a sense of fullness that you never bother to cross-reference at all.

Then instinct piles on. Chasing novel stimuli is an evolutionary trait. Being drawn to short, punchy stories has been in us since oral tradition. Platforms amplify these impulses through dopamine reward loops. Cheap to produce in infinite quantities, indistinguishable within 7 seconds, and wired into our biology — there’s no reason bad content shouldn’t win.

Does Good Content Become Worthless? The Case of Gold

If the story ended here, the conclusion would be bleak. Content that paid its cost — in time, thought, verification — gets pushed out of the market and dies.

Look at money, and the answer changes.

Paper currency can be printed in any quantity you like. So it’s everywhere — coffee, rent, taxes, all paid in paper. Gold coins can’t be printed. They have to be mined and refined, which makes them scarce. Nobody buys groceries with gold coins. Common paper covers every transaction in the world, while rare gold sits locked in vaults.

Now look at the price. The more paper gets printed, the thinner each bill’s value stretches — that’s inflation. Gold, locked away and unused, rises in price year after year. Even the central banks that print the most paper keep adding to their gold reserves.

You can print as much paper as you want, but you can’t print the belief that it isn’t toilet paper. The more you print, the more desperately you need something real backing it up. The more the common thing dominates circulation, the more expensive the rare thing becomes. Gold didn’t vanish. It moved from covering the world to holding the world up.

Good content resembles that gold in two ways. First, it’s the ore. A significant share of the bad content floating around was ultimately extracted from — or copied from — something someone made properly. Second, it’s the collateral. In an era where content can be produced at zero cost in infinite volume, the belief that there’s something real behind it all — that belief rests on the work that actually paid its cost. The more bad content floods the market, the more valuable the good becomes.

The market knows this. There are estimates that for the same 1,000 impressions, properly produced video commands an ad rate ~20–50× higher than mass-produced filler. Bad money supposedly drives out good, yet the actual money treats good content as exactly what it is — scarce and valuable. Good content doesn’t disappear. It gets expensive.

But like a gold coin, it gains value at the cost of circulation. Paper is everywhere and diluted. Gold is locked up and precious. Good content circulates expensively among the few who recognize its worth, but it doesn’t spread widely to the masses. Bad content lost its value and gained liquidity. Good content lost its reach and gained its value.

Which one do you hold?

Liquidity and Value — Where Do You Stand?

Two paths sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. Both are legitimate.

One end: sell liquidity. Use this era for what it is. Identify what the crowd will pay attention to, produce it fast and cheap. Depth is optional — whatever the substance, if it grabs eyeballs, reach and speed follow. Short-form is the standard vehicle, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the format. It’s a strategy that works, and plenty of people make a living this way. The catch: if all you sell is liquidity, you can be replaced the moment someone sells it cheaper. A shaved coin gets driven out by a more shaved coin.

The other end: mine gold. Pay the cost — time, thought, verification — and make something real. The reward comes not from mass reach but from scarcity: a narrow but loyal readership, a market willing to pay a premium. The trade-off is real, though. Gold lives in vaults. Reach is slow. The audience is small. It can be lonely. The market for good work exists, but it’s small, and you have to be able to endure that smallness.

These aren’t the only two options. Your spot is probably somewhere between them — weighing how much reach to chase, how much depth to trade away. There’s no right answer. But you should know where you’re standing and what you’re giving up to stand there. If you don’t, you’ll drift — shaving coins without realizing that’s what you’re doing.

Where on the spectrum have you chosen to stand — and the scarier question: did you choose to stand there, or did you just get carried?