Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #10, I explain why market saturation is nearly always overblown, and why even an over-saturated market isn’t a true obstacle to your own personal success.

 

 

Transcript: Aren’t There Too Many Copywriters Already?

Hi guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series, where we discuss marketing and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Today I want to answer the question, “Aren’t there too many copywriters already?”

And if you’re new to the field, if you’re an aspiring copywriter, this might be on your mind:

“Am I too late to the party?” “I see copy writers everywhere.” “I hop on LinkedIn and search copywriter or Google copywriter, and I see thousands and thousands of writers.”

Am I too late? Is the market already saturated?

I’m going to answer this in two ways.

First, we’re going to talk about what market saturation actually means, because it’s a very misunderstood concept, and it’s going to really affect any career or business decision you make throughout the rest of your life. I’d like to share a little something that I think will pay dividends for you, not just with this topic, but down the road as well.

Secondly, we’ll apply that to the copywriting landscape specifically and discuss:

* what we’re seeing right now in the market,

* where it seems to be heading,

* and what you should expect as the market continues forward.

To start, what we really need to begin with is supply and demand. If you’re not familiar with this concept, I will try to include a visual on this page, because it does help to visualize it. Essentially, you have demand, which is how many people want something and how much of it they want, you have supply, which is how many people are supplying that thing—creating, delivering that thing—and how much of it they’re creating.

And where those two things intercept, that’s kind of what dictates the price. The price will be determined to some extent via the manufacturing cost or the delivery cost, the true value of the product—the margins that are somewhat accepted within the field. But where the actual price falls isn’t super important here as much as how the changes in demand and supply are going to change it. And that’s really what we’re going to be discussing here.

So as demand increases relative to supply, the price goes up because more people want it while there’s still the exact same number of suppliers. Now the suppliers can charge higher for it because more people are competing to purchase the limited supply. But the price doesn’t just stay high.

What happens is new suppliers will typically enter the field to take advantage of the increased prices. As new suppliers come in, the supply goes up and that causes the price to go back down to kind of where it was before.

What also can happen is you get so many suppliers coming in—people who are a little late to the party—and that causes the rates to drop even lower; once the rates are below where they were before, certain suppliers won’t be able to last in that environment, so they’ll drop out, and again, the price kind of comes back to where it was originally.

That’s not typically a static thing. That’s an ongoing cycle that happens in virtually every field and industry. And we’re not talking about five people here, we’re talking about thousands and thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, depending on how big the market is.

The thing you really need to understand is that scenario happens everywhere in every market. So,