Fighting Content Fatigue with More Content

The problem has a name. Content fatigue. People are saturated. They scroll past. They read the subject line and delete. They don’t click anymore. They don’t respond anymore. The feed is full, the inbox is full, the attention is empty.

The diagnosis is right. What the industry does with it is the joke.

The solution: even more content. Just produced faster. More personalized. Better timed. With AI. The machine is supposed to produce the content that people are already rejecting. Faster. In greater volume. In more variations. Like treating obesity with more food, just in smaller portions.

I’ve been waiting for years for someone in the industry to notice what’s happening here. Nobody notices.

The problem with content fatigue isn’t that the content is poorly timed or badly personalized. The problem is that there’s too much of it. Every company, every brand, every freelancer produces content. Daily. Hourly. The volume has tripled since 2020. People’s capacity to absorb it has stayed the same.

That’s not a communication question. That’s physics. A container that’s full doesn’t take anything more. No matter how well you package it.

What AI does when you point it at content production is not raise quality. It’s lower the threshold. What used to require a copywriter, an editor, and half a day of work now takes a prompt and three minutes. The consequence isn’t better content. The consequence is more content at a lower threshold.

Every email I delete without opening was produced by someone who believed it was relevant. Maybe an AI optimized the subject line. Maybe an algorithm chose the timing. Maybe my name was inserted for personalization. I delete it anyway. Not because the technology is bad. But because it’s the twentieth email of that kind this week.

The promise always sounds the same: AI can help send “the right message at the right time to the right person.” That’s the sacred sentence of digital marketing. It sounds logical. In practice it means: twenty companies simultaneously send the supposedly right message to the same person. And the person tunes out.

Content fatigue isn’t a problem you solve with better content. It’s a problem you solve with less content. With silence. With choosing not to say something when you have nothing to say. That’s not in any marketing book, because restraint isn’t a business model.

In my life, I’ve read exactly the texts that changed me because someone had something to say. Not because someone had to say something because the editorial calendar demanded it. The difference is palpable. In the first sentence. Sometimes in the title. You can tell immediately whether someone is writing because they have to, or because they know something.

AI can produce texts. What it can’t do: know when to say nothing. That ability is dying out.

What you end up with is an industry that fights the problem it created with the tools that make it worse. The machine produces the noise and then gets deployed to be heard above the noise. That’s not progress. That’s a cycle nobody is listening to anymore.