Author: Simon Attard
Most businesses quit their content one month before it would have worked
I have watched the same pattern play out for more than twenty years. A business starts publishing with real energy. A few posts, a few videos, a steady run of social content. They keep it up for two or three months, see very little in return, and quietly stop. Nobody deletes anything. They simply stop adding to it.
And almost always, the business walks away just before the point where the work would have started to compound. They judged a long game by short game rules and moved on, usually much closer to the payoff than they realised.
Why one post you have forgotten can still earn its keep for years
Here is the mechanism most people miss. Good content does not behave like an advert, which stops the moment you stop paying for it. It behaves more like an asset that keeps working in the background.
Tomasz Tunguz, an investor who has written about this for years, describes content marketing as having a cumulative and compounding return. Looking at his own best performing posts, only around forty
percent of the views arrived on the first day. The majority came later, often long after publication, pulled in by search, by email and by people sharing older pieces again. HubSpot’s research gave the idea a name. They called them compounding blog posts, the roughly ten percent of posts that keep climbing instead of fading, and found that this small group can drive close to forty percent of a blog’s total traffic over time.
A minority of your content does most of the heavy lifting, quietly, for a long time, after you have forgotten you even made it. That is the promise. The catch is that you cannot tell in advance which pieces will become the compounders, which is why consistency matters more than any single clever idea.
Then the internet quietly changed the rules while you were publishing
I am not going to pretend the ground has not moved, because it has, and ignoring it would be dishonest. The way people find content is shifting fast.
Ahrefs, analysing around a hundred and fifty thousand search terms, estimates that Google’s AI Overviews have cut the clicks reaching the top ranked page by roughly fifty eight percent compared with two years ago. Their summary of where this is heading is blunt. Search, they say, is becoming zero click. The machine reads your content, answers the question inside the results page, and the user never arrives. If your entire content plan rested on ranking first and collecting the click, that plan is weaker today than it was last year.
Compounding is not dead. It moved somewhere harder to fake.
So does content still compound? Yes. But the mechanism matured, and the lazy version stopped working.
The point of compounding was never really the click. It was trust. Here is the detail I keep coming back to from Tunguz’s own numbers: more than half of his traffic came from direct visits, email and people returning deliberately, not from a search engine sending strangers. Those people were not looking for an answer. They were looking for him.
That is the shift. When a machine summarises the web for everyone, ranking stops being the asset and being trusted becomes the asset. You want to be the source the AI quotes and the human remembers. You want your name to be the one that surfaces when someone finally moves from browsing to buying, because only a small fraction of any market is ready to buy at any given moment. Content that compounds today is content that builds familiarity and authority slowly, so that you are already known when the moment arrives. That cannot be gamed or bought in a hurry, which is precisely why it is worth building.
When content stops being decoration and becomes the engine
We saw this clearly in our work with Mobil 1, delivered through Lubricom. Instead of treating content as a stream of disposable posts, we built genuine expert material around the products and the launch, the kind of content a real customer actually searches for and trusts.
Over time that content became their main lead generation engine, not a decoration sitting beside the advertising. Each piece kept working long after it went live. That is compounding in practice, and it is a very different thing from posting for the sake of posting.
Patience is the one advantage your competitors will not copy
Here is the part that interests me most, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about why people behave the way they do. Compounding content does not fail because the strategy is wrong. It fails because it asks for patience, and patience is emotionally expensive.
We are wired to want a return we can see. The quiet middle of a content strategy, the months where you are publishing well and the numbers barely move, feels like proof that it is not working. It is not proof of anything. It is simply the cost of entry, and it is the exact point where most of your competitors give up. Their impatience is your opening.
The businesses that win with content are rarely the most talented or the most creative. They are the ones who could tolerate the slow middle, who treated each piece as a deposit rather than a lottery ticket, and who understood that an asset takes time to appreciate. So the real question is not whether content works. It is whether you can hold your nerve long enough to let it.
How MYC Delivers This
At MYC we build content as an asset, not as a monthly obligation to be ticked off. The work we did for Mobil 1 with Lubricom turned expert content into a lead engine that kept earning well after launch, and
that same discipline, patient, strategic and built to last, runs through the rest of our work. If you would rather have content that is still working for you in two years than content forgotten in two months, take a look at what we have built at our portfolio.