While publishers scramble to create original, new content, popular curators are taking the credits—and the money, says New York Times media critic David Carr. The “curators and the curated” session at South by Southwest sparked heated debate.
Content curation is the act of (re)discovering, collecting, and presenting content, not necessarily creating new content. David Carr of the New York Times , is not a big fan of making money from content curation. Next to him on the panel was Maria Popova, curator of the popular website Brainpickings.org . David writes original content, Maria collects and references existing content, and both make a living from it. Also on the panel were Flipboard's curator Mia , Longform's Mark Linksy , and founder of the tool Percolate , Noah Brier .
Business model
Maria does consider content curation a form of authorship, David does not. The New York brother cell phone list Times business model is advertising revenue, while Brainpicking.org's business model is donations. Maria is one of the few curators who does not earn directly from the content:
“I love researching, writing, editing, and curating Brain Pickings. But it takes over 200 hours a month (add to that another 200 for the twitter feed and 50 more for the newsletter) Keeping it all ad-free ― which is important to me and, I believe, to you ― means it's subsidized by the generous support of readers like you.”