A few days ago, I saw a tantalizing clickbait headline, which read,
“Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?”
I clicked and landed on a blog post, which took me for a spin. It turns out there was no PTSD way back when. But that doesn’t matter as much as what I read at the top of the post.
At the top of the post, the author, one Brett Deveraux, gave a recap of the first year of his blog. He started in May 2019. He’s written several dozen posts since then, mostly on ancient military history.
But get this… Deveraux’s blog has had 650,000 visits so far. The number of monthly visitors keeps growing. Each post gets dozens of comments. And Deveraux’s even got 93 Patreon subscribers.
Just in case I am not making the astoudingness of this perfectly clear:
This is an academic historian. Writing on things like PTSD in the Roman army. Who will soon get a million eyeballs on his blog. And who, if he were just a tad better at marketing, could pull in thousands of dollars from his hobby site each month.
Doesn’t this sound like 2010? Is the long tail still alive and well? Does Google have a crush on Brett Devereaux for some reason?
Here’s my theory.
The most popular content on Deveraux’s site, by far, is a series of posts analyzing the siege of Gondor. (Lord of the Rings movie 2, in case you’re too cool.)
In other words, Deveraux used a popular movie to illustrate his arcane knowledge. Knowledge which would otherwise be completely indigestible to the vast majority of people.
This reminded me of another popular content creator I’ve been harping on about. I’m talking about movie editor Tony Zhou. Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting on YouTube has the exact same structure as Deveraux’s blog. An expert in a specialized field, using fun pop culture to illustrate the basics of his craft.
As a result of this pop culture + expert mashup, Zhou and Deveraux had their content massively shared. For Zhou, it was through YouTube and on sites like Reddit. For Deveraux, it seems the nerds at Hacker News really like his stuff.
That’s how both Zhou and Deveraux got all that traffic and engagement.
So what’s the point of all this?
Well, I would like to suggest that this is a model you too could use. If you have any kind of dry, industry-specific knowledge nobody seems to care about, then pair it up with sexy pop culture illustrations. Show a clip from a movie. Then explain what really happened there, seen through the lens of your unique wisdom.
And write me a year after you publish your first post or video. Let me know how many millions of views you’ve had in the meantime. And if you need help monetizing your site at that point… well, that’s where my own dry expertise comes in.