Online Business Models

How can content curation in a niche information area be monetized? Ask Joe Wilkert.

He writes: "There’s too much content out there anyway and I certainly don’t need access to even more of it. What I really need is more curation and less volume.

I want someone else to read it all and then tell me what I absolutely need to read.

They act as a filter and I pay them because they save me time and make me smarter."

The article points to the added value that traditional content publishers can offer their readers by opening the gates to community curators, who, by doing what they like the most, can bring back lots of more subscribers and attention to their brands.

"...There are sports experts, business experts, local community experts, etc. These curators are reading everything you’re publishing and picking the best of the best... They in turn publish their lists to a whole new set of subscribers; these readers pay for access to only the content recommended by the curator, not the full editions.

The best curators float to the top and drive more subscriptions than the others and you pay them a commission for each subscriber they bring in. Curators establish brand names for themselves, as in, “hey, if you’re into travel you need to subscribe to Bob Thomas…he finds all the best travel articles so I don’t have to.”

But there's more, as Mr Wilker points out. The opportunities don't end there.

Rightful. Recommended. 8/10

Full post: http://www.olivesoftware.com/3/post/2014/04/-community-curation-by-joe-wikert.html 

Reading time: 3' mins.

See also: http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe/2013/06/curation-and-personalization-not-discovery.html 

Image credit: Honey dripping by Shutterstock

Vincenzo Marino does an excellent reporting job on the International Journalism Festival news site, by summarising and distilling the good stuff emerging from an interesting and sustained debate on Twitter (Business Models for Journalism - Storify) on the state of online journalism and its potential future business models, initially kicked off by entrepreneur and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

Among the highlights, what Andreessen calls “the most obvious eight business models” for now and the future:

1. Quality journalism for high-quality ads

2. Succeeding in making readers subscribe and pay for value products

3. Premium content worth buying

4. Relying on live conferences and events

5. Investing across multiple channels

6. Crowdfunding ("Gigantic opportunity especially for investigative journalism")

7. Offering the option to pay in Bitcoin for micropayments

8. Keeping an eye on philanthropy (like ProPublica and Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media)

One stratospherically important point to take home from this valuable roundup is the following: 

"The role played by quality, however, is crucial especially when analyzed in the light of the tendency of the market to expand, creating less accurate content.

The challenge is to make a product (or brand) a point of reference, a lighthouse in the night of uncontrolled content and viral hoaxes."

Informative. Resourceful. Insightful. 8/10

Original article: http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/state-of-the-media-and-possible-business-models/ by Vincenzo Marino 

Reading time: 12 mins.

Tara Hunt, has an interesting article spotlighting the fast growing importance that curators are gradually gaining on the Internet and on the subsequent need to find ways for properly compensating original content creators.

She writes: "...while creators are necessary and amazing, curators are the ones raking in the dough.

I was alerted today by a friend that a video that Carlos and I made for Vine that had become super popular (over 118,000 likes + 77,000 Re-vines) was featured on a Facebook page called Best Vines and making its way around (with over 230,000 likes + 46,000 shares). The page owner lifted the content off of Vine and reposted it on his own page (no credit back to the original). This page has over 6.2M likes.

Now, this video of Ridley took us all of 30 seconds to make and we had no idea it would ‘go viral’, but for people like Will Sasso who appears to make it his full-time gig to make entertaining, engaging content on Vine and other places, this would probably be a bit of a violation. 

The curator is getting more cred for recognizing good content than the creator is for making good content."

And she is definitely right.

But as she correctly points out, there are already effective solutions in place, such as the YouTube authorship claiming facility which allows for original creators to digitally mark their own creations while giving full permission to curators to leverage and re-distribute them. This YouTube approach is the one that makes it possible for content creators to receive a share of the advertising revenue coming to YouTube, even when their clips are curated and played back on other sites.

The opportunity is there, not just for textual content, but also for video, music, photography and all of their sub-categories to be curated and monetized for the benefit of everyone.

Insightful. 8/10

Full original article: http://tarahunt.com/2013/07/20/creationcuration/