Nick Eubanks has a line he has been repeating, and it is the kind that reorganises a strategy deck once you accept it.
Distribution Is The Only Remaining Moat
“distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite”
Nick Eubanks, Digistore24
The premise is that the constraint has moved. Producing a competent article, a competent landing page, a competent video used to be the bottleneck and the differentiator. It is neither now.
What remains scarce is the ability to put the thing in front of people. Eubanks’ worked example on the show is a company doing enormous revenue on the strength of a distribution network rather than anything the team was building.
What Happens When Execution Becomes Infinite
If everyone can produce, production stops being a strategy. The follow-on effects are unpleasant for a lot of agency business models, because most of them are priced per unit of execution.
Eubanks traces his own distribution history through affiliate work — he was a large SEMrush affiliate in 2012 — and the point he draws from it is that distribution assets compound in a way that execution capacity does not. An audience you can reach is worth more each year. A team that can write faster is worth less each year.
Humans Brief, AI Drafts, Humans Edit
His view on where AI belongs in a content pipeline is specific, and it is the inverse of what most teams built:
“I think that’s actually like, when you look at the human in the loop process where you’ve got the start, have to create the brief with AI and a human writes the draft and then an AI does the proofreading and editing and then they publish it, I think it’s completely backwards.”
Nick Eubanks
“Where I think things are better, exactly, like I, where the best results that I’ve seen from a content perspective is where it’s humans actually doing the brief still and then it’s AI writing the draft and then it’s humans doing the editing.”
Nick Eubanks
Human judgement at both ends, machine throughput in the middle.
Most Agencies Have It Exactly Backwards
The reason the wrong order became popular is that it is the profitable one. Eubanks describes the temptation directly: the brief was always the painful, expensive part of the process, so the moment it could be automated, teams automated it — five questions in a form, an automated brief, still billed at the old price, delivered in five minutes.
That saves the cost of the one step where human judgement was actually doing work, and keeps the human on the step a machine handles competently. It is efficient and it is backwards.
More on content strategy from the show in content strategy and marketing deep insights, the AI side in AI and the future of search, and a complementary take from Stew Fortier on AI writing and SEO.
