My apologies. "Consume content" has become a pet peeve of mine. It's a dehumanizing and overly reductionist phrase, and isn't even technically correct (the best kind of correct).
That said... Unless you've got an overtly superior alternative, time to move on and join the fray. It's simply a concise way to say "read / watched / listened" when context of which media doesn't matter.
I mention it here, though, because the number of people who find that language problematic seems to be on the rise, and that may inform how authors write.
It's barely tolerable when used in that sense, but typically it's not used in that sense. The problem is the widespread abuse of the term. When I first started hearing it used, it was weird but didn't irritate me because it was usually used in the sense you're saying here. But then it started being used all over the place, even when speaking of a single sort of media.
I'm not saying this is right, but it has become a bit of a "red flag" word to me these days, indicating to me that the the piece where it's being used is not of great quality.
It's like getting mad when someone says "I had noodles for lunch" when you know perfectly well they had /spaghetti/, and if they'd said /spaghetti/ you could get irate because they actually had /ragu/ spaghetti (meat in the spaghetti sauce).
Using the abstract word it still "fine" if that's the level the speaker wants to give.
Saying "noodles" doesn't devalue spaghetti.
1) attracting XXX eyeballs/consumers per quarter
2) producing YYY amount of content for consumption
3) monetizing consumers for $ZZ/mo
'customer' implies commerce happened, 'listener' implies listening happened. 'consumer' is a higher abstraction than either of those.
It's the most abstract word someone could think of to say "X internalized Y".
e.g. "X took Y and added it to itself... let's not get distracted with how. the important thing is, X took Y and internalized it."
I guess we could, uh, go with "internalizer". I'd be down with that.
In the old days, we called those people the "audience".
What your audience hopefully does with your work is "learn" or "be entertained".
You're thinking "Book + Me = Book + Me" but in the context of me it's...
Me + Food = Me with more nutrients.
Me + Book = Me with more knowledge.
That said, I believe OP is offended at being referred to in an impersonal way. As such, I don't believe there's much to be done for him beyond "don't refer to people by their actions", which is impractical.
"I ingested [The Sandlot]" or "We had 50,000 ingesters of [The Sandlot] this week!"
are, to my mind, faaaaaairly equivalent to
"I consumed [The Sandlot]" or "We had 50,000 consumers of [The Sandlot] this week!"
Not terribly compelling but... "ingest" has a gut association whilst "consume" has a head connotation... so... there's that.
However, there is a fun distinction between the two. "Consuming" a book, to me, just implies you read it. "Digesting" and "ingesting" have implications of /rumination/.
The goal of consuming content is not to enjoy listening to other people, enjoy reading, or enjoy writing/talking.
The goal of consuming content is to absorb and internalize information, and broaden knowledge base.
To me, the usage of the term "consume content" is perfectly fine
Their use signals to me that I'm being exposed to a particular type of source that disrespects their audience and tends to produce substandard work.