Curators Are the New Creators

Link: Curators Are the New Creators

Intro

Curating is also a form of creating. We witnessed the creators economy booming. Will there be curating economy? The boundary between them might be blurry.

Highlights

We’re experiencing a content overload.

When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet, find the people who can do the curating for us.

There are some quite successful examples in the digital world already:

Channels Stack is a curated site for educational content on YouTube, organizing hundreds of channels into defined categories. The Browser is a daily newsletter from someone who reads 1,000 articles a day, choosing his five favorites and sending them out with a short summary. Oftentimes, these linked articles don’t have a paywall of their own at all — but subscribers of The Browser pay to have them sent in a curated list.

And curators have existed for a long time:

We can go even further back — classic examples of successful curation businesses are record shops and bookstores

as well as boutique shops in fashion, DJs in music. Really good curators can also be prestigious.

In my view, however, the business of influencer bundling has only just begun. Curators are the new creators, and as consumers, we’re going to be willing to pay someone with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information at our fingertips.

To learn more, I asked my own audience about their favorite curated content: Below is a categorized list of some of the responses I received. My favorites are in bold:
Newsletters: Morning Brew, Everything Bundle, LetterDrop, Femstreet, Brain Pickings, The Generalist, The Browser, Snaxshot, The Profile, The Takeoff, Social Studies, Techmeme
Podcasts: Podcast Notes, TLDL, Shuffle, Podshots, Podcast Review
Crowdsourced Curation: Pocket, Bookshlf, Listory, MyHighlights

The digital curation ecosystem also need money to fuel, and there are proven ways already:

One way to monetize curation is through a paid newsletter

I even came across ReadBase during my research, which allows curators to monetize their bookmarks and reading lists.

Other opportunities include blogs, ebooks, e-commerce stores, and consultations/speaking gigs.

Another opportunity is building a community:

It’s clear that curating content within a particular niche can be an incredible way to build an audience and add value.

Content curation hooks people in with the promise of learning new skills while saving time, and it keeps them coming back by building a sense of community around a particular subject or vertical.

In the end, from a high-level perspective, there isn't a clear line between curation and creation:

Curation, in a sense, is its own form of intertextuality, or the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.

Think Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and all remix songs.

Closing Comments

• You can see all curators as the secondary market of information (or say influences).  Just like limited companies empowered normal people to do trade centuries ago, The Internet has empowered everyone to publish information, fostering a primary market. According to history, a booming secondary market will probably follow.
• When delivering something to the public, there will always be a tradeoff around the audience. Today, most content is optimized for broaden the reach, at the cost of not serving the core audience really well. Curation could help with this problem.
• While people are starting to worry that algorithmic recommendations only feed us viral content, it's a good time to do high quality curating.