What Are Some Examples of "Non-Commodity" Content?

I've talked before about different kinds of content, with different purposes. Obviously, you have big categories like landing pages, commercial content, and informative content. There are other types of content, though, and it can be worthwhile to know what they are and how to use them.

One categorization that is very worth knowing today is the distinction between commodity content and non-commodity content. So, let's get right to it!

What is Commodity Content?

The definition of the word commodity, according to Merriam-Webster, is this:

• An economic good, such as a product of agriculture, an article of commerce, or a mass-produced, unspecialized product.
• A good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors other than price.

There are other definitions, but these are the ones most relevant to content.

You see commodities every day. Our world is saturated with them, but you might not even really recognize them for what they are.

To do so, it helps to know what the opposite of a commodity is. In fact, there are a lot of possibilities that aren't commodities.

• Services, particularly services with unique or bespoke offerings.
• Experiences, since a big part of the value of an experience is what you get out of it.
• Luxury products, where factors like quality, brand name, or materials make a difference.

Coors Lite is a commodity; a small-batch IPA made by a local microbrewery is not. 

So, how does this apply to content?

Content like you find on blog posts all across the web is, by and large, commodity content. The key is that it's all fundamentally replaceable. Commodity content is content that has nothing truly unique or personal to it. 

A piece of commodity content could be considered generic content, basic content, or flat content. It's something that could be filled with cited sources and links and factual statements, but it's not something unique to your business.

If the content you publish could be replicated by another business, effectively word for word, and wouldn't lose anything in the change, then it's commodity content.

To be clear, commodity content isn't bad content. In fact, much of it is quite good, valuable to have, and useful to read. Wikipedia is commodity content, by design; all of its value comes from reputable third-party sources, not personal anecdotes from Wikipedia editors or site owners.

That doesn't make Wikipedia bad, but it does mean that if Encyclopedia Britannica had 1:1 copies of everything on Wikipedia, there would be no true difference between them besides branding.

What is Non-Commodity Content, Then?

Non-commodity content is content with something unique and bespoke to it. 

This concept has been around for a long time, but it's been circulating in the public consciousness (at least with we marketers) a lot for the last couple of months. You can blame it, like you can many things in marketing, on Danny Sullivan and Google.

At the April Google Search Central event, Sullivan gave a presentation, and one of the key slides was a comparison between commodity and non-commodity content. His table had three examples.

• Top 10 Things to Consider When Buying Running Shoes vs. Why This Customer's Shoes Collapsed After 400 Miles: A Wear Pattern Analysis
• 7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers vs. Why We Waived the Inspection (And Saved $15k): A Look Inside the Sewer Line
• 2024 Kitchen Trends You Need to See vs. Marble vs. Grape Juice: Why I Refused to Install Stone for a Family of Five

The idea is that the first of each pair is commodity content. It's general, it's workmanlike, it's not particularly unique. It may be valuable, but it doesn't have personality. The second of each pair is much more rooted in personal experience and expertise.

Sullivan's point is that Google wants to see this more personalized content. And really, we've known this for years, right? Most recently, things like EEAT have been pushing in that direction. Even before, though, things like Authorship were earlier attempts at the same goal.

Google doesn't want the top ten search results to be ten examples of the same thing. Panda, back in 2011, nuked millions of sites that were carbon copies. Over a decade of algorithm updates since have punished spun content and effective copies. 

LLMs, Google AI Overviews, and the Changing Paradigm

As you can probably guess, this, like everything else in marketing, has been affected deeply by AI.

In this case, Google's increasing push for non-commodity content is heavily influenced by its use of AI for its AI Overviews.

The thing to know about commodity content is that, because it's effectively generic, it's the exact kind of content an AI excels in creating. That means commodity content is more likely, potentially, to have been AI-generated.

Non-commodity content is much harder for AI to generate. While AI can replicate anecdotes and experience, it's a lot harder for that personalization to make sense, maintain internal consistency, and remain the same across multiple posts on your site.

I have a lot of personal anecdotes on this blog. If you've followed me for a while, you've gotten a sense for the kind of person I am, the kinds of experiences I've had, and my positions on various issues in marketing and beyond. Obviously, some of it is a persona put on for the business, but it's all fundamentally me.

When a site AI-generates its content, especially if they try to AI-generate non-commodity content, they end up with a disjointed public face. It can say contradictory things, from post to post or even within the same post. All the LLMs care about is that the output resembles what an anecdote looks like, not that there's a throughline that makes sense.

AI Overviews have pushed this even more to the forefront.

AI Overviews are generative AI outputs taking the top Google search results as input. They essentially distill the commodity content down into a sort of Topic Essential Oil, giving readers an overview stripped free of the trappings of branding.

Sites that have spent years or decades building up a library of commodity content are feeling the squeeze. Sites that have focused more on personal experience and personality are tending to do a bit better.

This begs the question of why Google is pushing for more non-commodity content, though.

The way I see it, there are two possible answers, and the one you believe depends on how cynical you are.

The first, and less cynical, is that Google recognizes that AI is very good at outputting commodity content, and that they won't be able to truly differentiate between well-done commodity content and generative commodity content. So, to help brands stand out and survive in the sea of generic slop, they emphasize the things AI isn't good at and encourage you to produce non-commodity content.

The more cynical is that it's all a ploy to refine the LLMs. If the AI is bad at creating non-commodity content, using its immense power as the leader of search and the guide of how content is produced, they encourage people to create more non-commodity content. This, effectively, becomes a massive and voluntary (if unwitting) creation surge of training data, which would then let the AI become better at creating non-commodity content. The relationship between AI and SEO is still evolving in ways most site owners haven't fully reckoned with.

Like I said, it depends on how cynical you are about the whole thing.

What Are Some Examples of Non-Commodity Content?

If you just look at the slide Danny Sullivan shared, you'll get a particular kind of impression. At least, I did.

Non-commodity content feels a lot like the style of clickbait that was popular in the 2010s.

Right? It's not "Why Marble Countertops Aren't the Best Choice", it's "This Family Spilled Grape Juice On Their Marble Countertops; You Won't Believe That Happened To Them!"

Now, that's not really true. I'm being a bit disingenuous. But the core concept is still there. Generic content is less interesting, has less pathos and is less compelling to click and read.

Clickbait, though, is not really non-commodity content. In fact, one of the big problems with clickbait was that it pretended to be non-commodity content, while being firmly commodity content. That's why sites like Buzzfeed were packed full of hundreds of thousands of "articles" that were nothing more than the most recent 22 popular posts from a particular Subreddit. If you want to see examples of Buzzfeed headlines and why they work, it's a useful study in what makes content feel compelling versus hollow.

Non-commodity content is content based on personal experience and uniqueness, which you then distill down into useful advice. They can be based on interactions with specific customers or clients, on studies you perform, and even personal experiences in your own life.

A few examples include:

• Backsplashes Add a Dash of Pattern and Color to Kitchen Renovations, Houzz Study Finds - A good example of a case study performed by the business and turned into useful information.
• Heartbroken Cat Learns to Trust Again - Mostly a story of a single cat, but it shows how cats with trust issues can be handled and brought back to health.
• What Happened When I Cut Out Sugar - A personal report of what happened when the author cut out sugar, with tips on how to do it yourself.

I'm sure you can find examples of your own, as well.

Now, none of these are really groundbreaking or wholly unique. There are plenty of examples of all three of them around, and only the Houzz post has anything another brand couldn't replicate first-hand, which is their study. But it goes to show that non-commodity content can still be valid and powerful, even if there's nothing truly unique about it.

Moving Forward with Non-Commodity Content

Google says non-commodity content is the way of the future. Most marketers I've seen say "eh, maybe not so fast."

Here's the thing: non-commodity content is undeniably powerful, but it's not going to carry your site.

Commodity content is still useful and, I would say, essential to a good blog. Right now, I think the best ratio is around 70/30 or 80/20, with the smaller portion being non-commodity content.

More realistically, though, I'd place it at something like a 40/40/20.

40% fully commodity content; your guides, tips, tutorials, and other keyword-driven resource content.

40% "dressed up" commodity content. This is commodity content that you infuse with the trappings of non-commodity content. It's putting lipstick on a pig, but like, good.

20% non-commodity content. The truly personal, deep, real stories.

Why do I break it down this way?

First, commodity content still has a role to play. A huge amount of modern search is centered around the AI Overview, and the AI Overview pulls heavily from commodity content and cites sources. You want to be cited, and commodity content is how you do that.

I'm not just claiming that, either. Several of my clients are among the most-cited in the AI Overviews in their industries, and it's almost always the commodity content doing it.

Commodity content still also ranks well, with a big asterisk. Commodity content is heavily dependent on site influence, reputation, and SEO value. There are only so many spaces in the search results for commodity content on a topic, and if you aren't big enough to be one of them, you won't get anything from the content.

Second, the non-commodity content is going to be increasingly important. I put it at 20% because of the 80/20 rule, but the specific proportion doesn't matter so much. It just matters that you have it.

The issue is that non-commodity content is often zero-click content. People see it, but they aren't necessarily going to click it. But, they might share it on social media, or with their friends, or link to it from elsewhere if they're content creators themselves.

Non-commodity content is harder to write by a lot. That's part of the point. So, it's a higher up-front investment for lower-end results.

But non-commodity content builds your brand. It builds thought leadership, social media exposure, and brand reputation. It's all about boosting EEAT, which then boosts the rest of your site.

Finally, that middle section, dressed up content. 

Here's the secret: a lot of the "non-commodity content" you find online, especially right now, is commodity content that was dressed up. It has anecdotes stapled to it, or it uses one for an intro paragraph and a title framing, but has little to do with the rest of the post.

In fact, that's a good way to proceed; take some of your mid-performing commodity content and put some lipstick on it. Dress it up in the trappings of a relevant anecdote. It becomes "non-commodity" content, while still maintaining the value of commodity content.

Producing Non-Commodity Content in the Future

If you're hoping to shift to a less commodified content strategy, it's going to be tricky.

The problem, generally, is that commodity content is a result of how content production teams operate.

When a managing editor does keyword research and hands down a list of keywords, and a topic editor turns those keywords into topics, and then a writer creates content on those topics, it works fine for producing commodity content.

But the disconnect between the writer and the business as a whole means that there's no real room for that personalization, that expertise, that direct experience. 

There are a couple of ways to get around this. One of them is to just allow the writer to make up whatever they want. This works fine for low-stakes sites (think food blogs, pet blogs, and the like), but it can be a lot harder when you get into business operations and verifiable stories.

It also needs to maintain consistency, as I've mentioned above.

It's the same on the opposite side of the spectrum; if you're a small business or solo operation, blogging is probably pretty far down on your list of priorities, and you probably turn to AI generation for your content. But AI is going to generate commodity content because that's how it works.

This is all why I recommend a relatively low proportion of non-commodity content, at least for now. It's harder to create, and it's better to have a few commodity posts than nothing while you work on a larger non-commodity project.

If you keep at it, though, adding non-commodity content to your overall content strategy is going to be an improvement over time.