If you can’t put an ad in it then it isn’t content. Insidiously, we now call things content even if they don’t have advertisement or are not created for show.
I grew up in a time and place where people who worked in bookstores did so because they liked books and were knowledgeable about the book industry as both distributors and consumers. Chain stores like Borders preferred to hire young and cheap and make stocking decisions centrally. The staff could probably have been swapped with a completely different retail establishment, and both outlets would have run in much the same way.
Free market advocates like to go on about the self-corrective nature of 'real' capitalism/competition, but never seem to have any answer for the existence of franchises or their tendency to crowd out other participants in a market by having a much deeper pool of capital to use as leverage. The idealistic models of perfect competition and price equilibrium only work well under elusive conditions and for fungible commodities.
When I first saw that it was gaining traction, I took it as yet another sign that the internet was effectively dead in terms of what always made it great for me, and had been turned into nothing more than business.
I don't like "content" either. I prefer "media". But there's an entirely logical reason we don't call it "entertainment". That would be like calling all clothing "pants".
If the "content" isn't entertainment, it often has no ads and is referred to via another name.
At least 95% of what I watch on Youtube is educational or technical. It's self-teaching material, math, science, that sort of thing. Most people would find it dry but I enjoy it.
Still, I wouldn't call it entertainment.
I assure you it has just as many ads: pre-roll ads, clickable ads below the fold, interstitial ads, and "a word from our sponsor" ads as everything else on YouTube.
I suppose I'd still classify it as entertainment even if you paid for YouTube premium.
If we call all content that we enjoy watching “entertainment”, then IMO the word loses the meaning a little.
It’s becoming hard to even find a youtube video that doesn’t have “like and subscribe” somewhere in it, even if it’s not otherwise sponsored.
Most of what I spend my time on on the web and YouTube is more towards educational than entertainment, though the line gets blurry (which is the point of having a unifying term like "content") when it comes to videos about music-making and stuff like that.
Also, here's a good website in general for this kind of stuff, thank you Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Conten...
The person talking about sales of "the thing" doesn't care what "the thing" is. The language implies that "the thing" itself is irrelevant. All that matters is that it's something that can be sold, and the only important datum is how many were sold. And maybe how much they were sold for. Aside from that, to the person using that language, it's all just undifferentiated stuff.
I think from there, if the person talking about "units" or "content" doesn't really care about what the thing is, they're going to care even less about whether it's a good example of that type of thing. Is it a good t-shirt? Or a bad pair of sneakers? Who cares - how many units were sold?
Are you making movie review videos? Or 30-minute+ EDM/prog fusion atmospheric music tracks? Or 5000-word investigative journalism takedowns of corporate shitfuckery? Or are you just making "content" - whatever will grab some eyeballs?
Obviously this is is valuable for the customers of social networks (advertisers), but it's usually not so blatantly exposed.
I don't have a problem with the word "content" in the context of content vs framing. e.g. if you are designing a network protocol, you care about distinguishing the content of the message from the framing, and you don't care at all what the nature of the content is, it could be video, image, text, etc, and it could serve many different purposes (entertainment, personal communication, employee training, archival/backup, etc).
However, this sort of language has crept into discussions of online entertainment, for no good reason. "I'm not an online entertainer, creating entertainment for people to enjoy, I am a content-creator creating content for people to consume." I think people don't like to think about what they're creating or consuming as entertainment, because society has already attached a connotation of triviality to the term "entertainment" (for good reason IMO).
Someone who talks about "content" is adopting the terminology and framing of a businessman, who cares little what purpose the "content" serves, just that it can attract attention, and thus money.
To be fair, once the internet is entirely taken over by bots, maybe it will be appropriate to call the stuff that bots create and consume "content" without a whiff of irony.