I appreciate your response, Nicholas! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Respectfully, I disagree with your suggestion that:

“Content must always lead to quality in the products we seek to deliver, whether service or goods.”

It seems to me that high quality content often does lead the reader to discover fantastic products and services but, as I see it, this is not the sole or even primary purpose of sharing helpful, inspiration, or educational content.

Indeed, in this article I try and substantiate the following key arguments:

1. Content is inherently valuable: “A fantastic piece of content is fantastic precisely because of the value it offers to those who consume it in the present moment — not because of the reputational and/or financial gains it might allocate to its creator at some point in the future.”
2. The purpose of content is to positively impact the reader: “[In-And-Of-Itself], a given piece of content should [be concerned with] inspiring, teaching, helping, or otherwise positively affecting those who consume it.”
3. The belief that publishing content is ultimately all about leading people to buy products and services cheapens the value of content as such: “Interpreting content as the ‘price’ that entrepreneurs and businesses must pay if they wish to ‘play the game’ of marketing and sales inevitably leads to a kind of thinking and ethics that makes it acceptable to set aside as irrelevant or unnecessary all questions about the worth of a piece of content as it exists in-and-of-itself.”