On the Incarnation and Zero-Click-Content

The two have more to do with each other than you might think.

“You’re fishing where the fish are.”

This line didn’t come from a commentary on Matthew 4:19, but near the end of Rachel Karten’s excellent piece “Legacy Media Companies Need a New Social Playbook”. Karten, who runs the wildly successful (and tremendously helpful) social media management Substack Link In Bio, argues something that social media managers have intuitively recognized for some time: the relationship between websites and social media platforms have changed, and using social media to drive web traffic (or “clicks”) is now a declining strategy. Something else must take its place.

For the first 15 years of social media, the relationship between social media and websites was straightforward: you used social media (Point A) to get people to your website (Point B). You couldn’t publish an entire article in a Tweet, or upload an entire video to your Facebook or Instagram feed, but you can give people enough of a teaser to convince them to click on your link and engage with your content. For media organization who leaned heavily on their website, social media was a dream distribution channel, one that was quick and easy to use with effective results. Social media companies, however, realized that they didn’t want to be a means to other ends; they wanted to be both the means and the end. They wanted to be the only destination, not just a stop along the way.

To do this, social media companies had to make two simultaneous moves. First, they had to dramatically increase their capacities for text, image, and video. Gone were the days of 140 characters or less and other limitations. Second, they had to increasingly penalize any attempts to “link out” of the platform (unless you were willing to pay to have those penalties removed, of course). Each platform made these two moves in their own way and on their own timetable, but the end result is this: nearly every platform now lets you upload an entire article’s worth of text as a social media post, or publish a YouTube length video to your account, and every platform penalizes you in some way if you try to take people elsewhere. Clicking, as a necessary step to overcome a technical limitation in how much content you could publish to a social media platform, was made unnecessary. Point A now supports the kind of content you used to get a Point B - and social media companies have every incentive to keep you at Point A.

“Zero-click-content”, first developed by social media veteran Amanda Natividad in 2022, is the idea that using social media to get people from point A to point B to engage with your content is no longer the most effective way to use social media. Rather than using social media to drive web traffic, Natividad argues the more effective strategy is to take your content and publish it to where people can engage with it without requiring a click to get it. You’re penalized for including links to your article, and most platforms let you publish an entire article’s worth of text, so why not take your content from Point B and give it to people in Point A? Is you goal to get clicks, or is the goal for people to read or watch your work in the place they spend all their time anyway?

(As an example of this, check the comments of this Substack post to see how I published this post natively on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Threads, BlueSky, and Instagram stories. You’ll notice I handle each platform differently, but I still point back to my Substack at the end. That’s a post for another day.)

Naturally, this is a controversial strategy, and like it any strategy, it has its pros and cons. The biggest con, of course, is that whatever little Point A-to-B web traffic you were still getting would be eviscerated. While social media reading/viewing is a popup-free and ad-free experience (ask yourself: how many times have you had to tap away at something while reading this?), it is also a terminal experience with a self-contained endpoint unless you get creative on how you point people to a next step. The biggest pro is that if your content is truly valuable to people - if your content is inspiring, educational, entertaining, or convicting and appeals to real interests - you are removing every barrier to people encountering that content and removing penalties that throttle your content’s reach in an algorithm. And, as marketers know well: if people like your stuff, it creates a desire for more of it, and the more desire you create, the more people will naturally seek out what you have to offer. Instead of an all-or-nothing proposition, where you either click a link in Point A to get all the content in Point B or get nothing at all, zero-click-content tries to get people’s awareness, attention, and affinity inside of Point A in the hopes they’ll eventually go to Point B because they can’t get enough of what they want in Point A.

“That’s all good and fine”, you may be thinking, “but what does any of this have to do with the incarnation?”

If Christianity is true, the biggest problem that you and I face is that God, the creator and sustain of all things and the source, fountain, and fullness of all goodness, joy, peace, and love, is in Point A. At one point, humans were also in Point A with God (in Eden), but because of our disobedience and sin, we are now in Point B, and separated from the righteous and holy Lord. How do sinful humans who have broken the Lord’s laws get made right with God? How do we get from Point B, where we are alienated and hostile to God and sentenced to the just decree of death as his enemies, back to Point A, where we enjoy fellowship and communion with the Lord as his adopted sons and daughters forever?

There are no shortage of ways where we have attempted to get ourselves from Point B back to Point A. If God is holy and cannot tolerate the presence of sin, we must be made holy ourselves. The problem is that we, in our own wisdom and power, cannot make ourselves holy. We are not just guilty of sin as a legal matter; as a spiritual force, it pollutes our entire being as well. Our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls are prone to any and every evil we can conceive of, the greatest evil of all being our willingness to call “good” what the Lord has called “evil”. We may try to clean ourselves up, get our act together, or do enough good things in an attempt to become holy, but our sickness goes much deeper than anything our beliefs and behaviors can cure in ourselves or in others. If we cannot get ourselves from Point B to Point A in our own efforts, our only hope is that the holy God himself comes down from Point A to meet us in Point B and save us.

Which is exactly what Christ did.

The incarnation, as a non-negotiable Christian teaching, is the final and definitive answer to the question “can humans get themselves from Point B to Point A?”, and the answer is once and forever “No”. Jesus Christ, in taking on a human nature and being born by the virgin Mary, is not only God’s way of decisively proving that we cannot save ourselves - it is also the beginning of the incredible lengths God himself will go to redeem his creation from the curse of sin’s tyranny. In the Gospel, Christ does not tell us to ascend, in our own wisdom and willpower, to his heavenly throne in order to find salvation. “Try harder” is not good news. No, in the Gospel, Christ tells us that he has come to us to seek us and to save us in the places where we are lost, and the incarnation is the first step of the Christ’s redemptive work of coming to Point B to bring us back to Point A.

“That’s glorious and makes Christ worthy of all our love and devotion”, you may be thinking, “but what does any of that have to do with this ‘zero-click-content’ stuff?”

I want to stress up front that I am very aware of the limitations of this comparison. There are some Christian terms that can get overused or stretched too far, and the word “incarnation” is one of those words. I do not want to suggest that social media strategy and one of the most important events in human history (second only to the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ) are fully identical to each other. They are not. All analogies break down somewhere and this one does as well. The point I want to make is that zero-click-content, as a social media content strategy, illustrates one aspect of the glory of the incarnation, and the incarnation, as an act of divine grace and hospitality, illustrates a major advantage of zero-click-content, especially for Christian writers and creators.

That point is this: Christ did not tell us to ascend to his heavenly throne in order to be saved. He left that throne to come to us, and accomplished our salvation in our midst. In the same way, zero-click-content does not ask that you click a link in order to be enriched by our valuable content on our crisp and pristine websites. Instead, it takes that content and generously and sacrificially gives it away in the space people now spend the majority of their (digital) time. Just as Christ left Point A to meet us in Point B to bring us back to Point A, we can do the same with our work.

Want to take the point deeper? A major argument in Athanasius’ On the Incarnation (one of the greatest theological works ever written) is that the purpose of Christ’s incarnation - to secure redemption for his people - necessitated that the incarnation take place in a way that was indisputably and unmistakably visible and present in the sight of all that lived during his life and ministry. Had Christ been incarnate and then later crucified and resurrected off in an obscure corner somewhere, or in a way that minimized his humiliation in his life and death, the incarnation would lose much of its decisive power. In the same way, zero-click-content takes content that is usually published somewhere in a (digital) corner and makes it visible in the (digital) sight of all. Instead of the power of your work only being realized if people come to your spaces to experience the wisdom and power of your work, you’re demonstrating the wisdom and power of your work in their spaces, with unmistakable social proof of the words you’ve said and the things you’ve done.

This may sound as though I’m calling for you to debase and devalue your work and cheapen it by contributing it to the social media content void. But I don’t think that is the case. For one, few things are more discouraging than pouring your talents into something and sharing it with the world, only to be met with a collective “meh” as people swipe by your URL post. Karten writes about this in a case study of her own work:

At a very small scale, I have tested this with my own “media company”—this newsletter. I initially tried promoting it with links across Twitter and LinkedIn. It got embarrassingly low engagement and zero subscription conversions. So I changed my strategy. In a Twitter thread where I broke down a newsletter about Reformation's influencer strategy I didn’t include any links, instead I delivered the insights where people were already scrolling. The thread took off and led to one of my highest newsletter subscriber days ever at the time. People sought me out. Awareness led to conversion. As the saying goes, "fish where the fish are."

Tactically, there are multiple routes you can take to do zero-click-content well. Natividad’s original approach is different from the route I currently take with The Gospel Coalition and its content. However you do it, the goal is still the same and your work isn’t devalued in the process. To briefly go back to the incarnation: it did not devalue or debase the divinity of Christ to take on a human nature in his person as a necessary step to accomplish our redemption. Rather, his humiliation is what led to his victorious exaltation (Phil. 2:5-11). Humbling yourself in how you share your work does not ruin your work. If anything, it can actually make your work more successful. Karten again:

“Clipping a podcast or breaking down a full story on a social platform doesn’t devalue journalistic work or cheapen a media company’s brand—it simply meets people where they are. . . [quoting Dave Jorgenson] ‘People are on TikTok, YouTube, Reels, and all kinds of places. They aren’t necessarily looking for a paper subscription, so why not grow trust with them on platforms where they’re already active?’”

It’s okay to not like this emerging shift in the Internet landscape, and not all website content can be adapted easily to a zero-click-content strategy. Websites will always be able to do things social media platforms will never be able to do. At the same time, though, we need to stare this new playing field in the face and respond to it soberly. As I say often in my role in The Gospel Coalition, the future is not website or social media; it is website and social media, whether we wish that were the case or not.

“But social media is dangerous”, you might be thinking.

“It’s full of horrible people who don’t care what you have to say or will read you in the worst possible way. It’s ruining our society and our churches and Christians should be trying to get people off social media, not trying to reach people inside of it.”

I agree. This Substack is called “Passing Through Digital Babylon” for a reason. Some (perhaps most) Christians would benefit by drastically cutting their time spent on social media or leaving it altogether. But here is the thing: if Christ was willing to leave his glorious throne to take on human flesh, and live as a sinless human in a world full of sin, and eventually be falsely accused, mocked, beaten, and eventually crucified to save us in Point B, I respectfully submit that we do not have any room to object to going to places we do not want to go to as part of using the gifts God has given us to fulfill the callings he has laid upon us. Jesus was not Jonah. Jesus, more than anyone else, knew exactly the dangers that laid in store, “but for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame…” (Heb 12:2) so that he might take us from Point B back to Point A.

There is more I could say here, and I will revisit this topic again around Easter to explain how the incarnation and zero-click-content converge further in the crucifixion and resurrection. But I will close with this: God has called some of us to participate in Digital Babylon whether we want to or not, yet we are not sent there alone. As with preaching, teaching, and evangelism, we plant and water, but it is God who gives the growth. If our confidence in our work is tied to our preferred forms of media ecology, but not in the Spirit as the true source that gives our words power in those ecosystems, we can and should despair that social media grows more powerful. If driving traffic from social media back to our websites is the only way our work can serve and bless people, we have every reason to fear the future.

But the Spirit is the Lord, even over the algorithms of man. And it is our confidence in the Spirit, not our confidence in our ability to drive web traffic, that ought to give us courage to take our Point A to where people are in Point B. Because of Christ, we too can fish where the fish are - and know our efforts won’t be in vain.

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Thanks for reading. Two weeks from now I’ll be sharing my best albums and books for the year. I’m already slow-dripping these on my personal socials but will publish the final list here in full. I am eager to see 2024 come to a close and to begin a new year of writing.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin