Lately I’ve been trying to understand the internet, specifically content CREATORS and content CURATORS. People that make things for the world wide web versus people that conveniently put all the best things in one place for me to enjoy.
And that all kind of seems like it it should be a smooth-sailing-system, but it doesn’t totally seem to be working out for everyone. Creators are struggling to make ends-meat or pay people, while curators are becoming massive influencers and hence more appealing to advertisers.
So, I decided to do some sleuthing to get to the bottom of “The Great Creationism Debate.”, coined by Mashable, that “pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation.”
Here are a few obvious points :
• We’re living in an era of content abundance, so curation (a filter!) is more necessary than ever.
• Curators would die without creators (obviously, they would have nothing to curate).
• Advertisers are embracing trusted ‘places’ over trusted sources — therefore even big-wig creators are moving towards mixing up created content with curated content.
• Creators, distributors, aggregators, and curators are all economically essential parts of the value chain (especially in the new wild wild west of media land)
So there it is, the internet is telling us all to do both. I had been leaning toward just posting my own content across the internet and not not others because in my mind I didn’t want to add more noise into the system with things lots of other people were already posting. But then I read this article that posed the question, isn’t promoting your own content akin to talking about yourself? So ultimately I thought I was being less annoying by not posting too much, but really I have been super annoying by only “talking about myself all the time”!
Plus the fine folks at Argyle Social media marketing did actual research, and determined that the best mix of creation and curation is to post between 25-50% of your own stuff (with 40% being the sweet spot), and then the rest should be pointing people in the direction of other cool shit.
So there you have it. The internet is telling us 40% creation, 60% curation. Do you agree?
PS. Those articles are both from 2010. Obviously people tried to understand this creator vs. curator thing awhile ago, but I still wanted to post this in case other people are as late to the game as I am.
