This post may seem a bit contradictory at first, considering the fact that I’ve built two successful businesses based in large part on attracting lots of eyeballs to the sites and then capitalizing on the numbers of readers they bring in. Yes, my newest venture churns out gobs of content aimed directly at striking while the iron is hot — but we haven’t (completely) gone the way of the content factories, the SEO-driven sites and pageview hungry blogs.

We still believe in quality bringing in quantity.

There’s too much buzz now about quantity: How many pageviews? How many uniques? How many articles? How many Twitter followers? How many Facebook fans?

These numbers that have such importance in our world can be — and usually are — all manufactured. Pageviews increased by teasers, articles churned out based on search-friendly keywords, Twitter and Facebook followers skyrocketed with promotions or help from ‘friends’… yet are any of them truly providing a real return? At the end of the day, the artificial numbers are doing a huge disservice to the businesses we’re creating and the brands we’re partnering with.

As with everything, the eco-system needs balance to thrive…and this shift in quantity over quality is throwing it all off. And, I say if it continues down this path, we’ll see the bubble burst just like it did in the early 2000′s…when I saw 90% of the companies I worked with vanish. Different circumstances, similar problem.

So what if? What if the majority of the bloggers, publishers, vloggers, etc. stopped trying to manufacture more views? What if we didn’t drown posts in purely SEO-friendly drivel, create videos with mediocre at best content — and what if we put more focus on quality? And what if the advertisers focused on a balance of quality and quantity? Would we see the numbers we want and actually have them mean something — providing quality returns for us and our partners?

I say yes. I’ve seen it in action, I’ve seen it work for my projects and a good handful of others. It may take a village to get this eco-system back on track, but it’ll be worth it.