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Module 2
Curation Case Studies
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Transcript
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Sites by Charlie Page
• CharliePage.com
• Directory of Ezines
• Follow Up Selling Systems
• Common Sense Blog Blueprint
• Common Sense Internet Marketing
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What I’d like to do today in this short presentation is share some specific
examples of sites that are using curation. Some of these sites are using
curation as their only business model, some are supplementing original
content with curation. My point today is this; curation is proven effective by
some huge mega sites that are earning millions of dollars and by smaller
sites where people are trying to establish themselves in a particular niche.
It’s very powerful, it’s very proven, and it’s very quick and easy.
Let’s take a look, for example, at social media. Facebook, if you think about
it, is really curated content. Facebook themselves, the Facebook employees
are not out there generating content. What they’re doing is warehousing the
content of other people. If you post to your Facebook page, your wall or
whatever is, and then people go and look at that, yes Facebook is hosting
that and displaying it, but they’re not creating the content. The user is
generating the content.
That’s the wave we want you to ride, the wave of user generated content.
More than ever before people are out there generating huge amounts of
content and you can benefit from that, like Facebook has, by being a place
that curates or gathers together that content into one place.
Pinterest is another example of this. Pinterest is kind of the “visual
Facebook” in the respect that it’s all graphics, it’s all visual. What they’ve
done, which is brilliant, is allow people to post pictures that interest them
and they’ve created this huge accumulated site curated with pictures of just
about any topic.
LinkedIn is another site that curates or gathers user generated content
together and has become a very successful by so doing that. It’s more for
business than for personal, although people use it for both.
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These three sites operate in three different spaces, really. Facebook is your
personal information, what’s happening with you now. Pinterest is a visual
representation of your life. LinkedIn has more to do with business. But all
three of these are dependent completely on user generated content. And
that’s a good thing.
Let’s take a look at one Facebook page as an example of what I’m talking
about. This is Seth Godin’s Facebook page and I’d like to point out three
things about this. This is one of my favorite guys, I think he’s a genius when
it comes to business. Here are three observations that I’d like to make.
Number one, the man has a huge audience; 241,000 people are liking his
Facebook page. And he himself says he’s not really into social media. Now,
you’re not Seth Godin and neither am I. He is. My point is that our audience
can grow as we do curation.
The second point I want to make is that Facebook isn’t putting any content
on here. You see down here this is all Seth sharing the different things that
he has to say.
The third thing I want to point out is over here on the right hand column is
what Facebook is doing is in exchange for curating all of this content from
Seth Godin, and hundreds of millions of other people like Seth, they’re able
to display these ads and make money. They’re charging people to display
those ads, but they could run those ads for themselves if they wanted to.
So Facebook is a very powerful example of curating user generated content,
displaying advertising, and making just a bunch of money.
Search engines and search tools are generally curated. What are they doing?
They’re displaying user generated content. Google, for example, doesn’t
generate the content it displays. They just have an algorithm that is smarter
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than anybody else’s that can find exactly what you’re searching for and
display it to you. If other people weren’t creating content, Google woudn’t
exist.
YouTube is another creation of Google, of course, but it’s the same thing
when it comes to videos. YouTube isn’t making and posting videos, Google
isn’t making and posting videos, although some Google employees do. My
point is that the people are creating the content. Users are creating the
content and YouTube is showing it and profiting from it by displaying
advertising.
Bing is another search engine, owned by Microsoft, that is doing the same
thing. Bing wouldn’t exist if other people weren’t creating content that they
can help you find more easily. Yahoo is a directory, not really a search
engine, but once again all based upon user generated content.
If you weren’t creating content that Google, Bing, Yahoo and the others
could index, if you weren’t creating videos that YouTube could display to
other people, none of these people would have a business.
Now, there are private sites that do this too. I happen to own one of them,
The Directory of Ezines. The Directory of Ezines is really curation if you think
about it, because we’re not publishing these ezines. What we’re doing is
we’re doing the research for you. That’s kind of what curation is. What we do
is research ezines, we contact the publishers, we run advertising in them, we
get to know them, we do all these things and then we display that
information to members inside a private membership area. That’s a type of
curation.
Another one is the Huffington Post. I’m going to say that the Huffington Post
started out as a really pure curation play and now they’ve evolved into a
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situation where they do a lot of original reporting. But if you think about the
Huffington Post what they do is bring together content from a lot of people
who have their particular point of view and that they believe their readership
are going to find interesting and they publish it on their website.
Here’s an example of Huffington Post, I took this screenshot today. Right
now there’s a lot going on in the Ukraine so they’ve got this big headline.
But if you look at all these areas over here that they have, they have
politics, business, entertainment, tech, media, and all these different things.
These are curations that they’re putting on their blog, these are not all their
original reporting. Again, they do have some original reporting, but most of
their content is curated.
Ecommerce sites are also great examples of curation. Amazon, for example,
does produce products now, they produce the Kindle and things like that, but
what do they really do? What they do is they gather together and sell other
people’s products. In an ecommerce sense they’re physically curating other
people’s products.
Etsy is almost a pure curation model in the respect that Etsy is a community,
a marketplace for people who make goods and want to sell them. We’ll take
a look at that in just a second.
eBay is another ecommerce example of curation, kind of in a digital way and
a physical way at the same time. People who are selling things online sell
them through eBay. eBay is not selling the products, eBay is not going out to
garage sales gathering up antique golf clubs, polishing them up and taking
pretty pictures of them, and putting on eBay. People do that, but eBay
makes a huge amount of money by being the place where all those people
can share their content. That’s called curation.
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Here is a screenshot of Etsy. I love this because it really speaks to curation.
Their little slogan is actually a curation slogan, “Shop directly from people
around the world.” What they’re saying is we have a marketplace where
people around the world can come, list their information, and you can buy
from them. That, my friend, is curation.
Information is another real good example of curation. Wikipedia – again, the
Wikipedia staff are not over there writing up those entries. They’re editing
them, they’re approving them, and they’re taking a look at them, but it’s
user generated content.
The Drudge Report is a good example. If you don’t know Matt Drudge and
The Drudge Report, it’s a news site that gets a lot of traffic and does very
well financially. He’s not writing these reports, he’s not writing these news
stories, he’s linking to them. We’ll see that in a just a second.
TED Talks is another example of a semi-curation play. This is not pure
curation, because the TED Talk people rent the hall and they bring the
speaker in and all that, but they’re not hiring speakers. In other words,
they’re not having TED Talk staff do the speaking, they’re bringing in people
who are well known in their field, like Seth Godin, and they’re having them
make a talk and then they film that, they edit that, they display it on their
website and they promote their concept.
It’s not so much a financial commercial play as it is promoting the idea of
great ideas, but it’s a good example of curation because their staff aren’t
making these talks, world famous people are making these talks. Sometimes
not world famous, but intelligent top of their field people are making these
talks and then TED is curating the content.
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Here’s one you might not have heard about that is very pure curation;
Gigaom Research. If you take a look at their website you’ll see a very pure
type of curation website.
Here’s a report on The Drudge Report’s website and this is what I wanted to
point out. Look at the top right hand corner; 131 in the United States rank.
Let your eyes come over to the left where it says unique visitors. That is
unique visitors per day; 2,345,896 unique visitors in a day. And that is a
curated website.
Does this guy work hard? You bet he does. Can you imagine how well he’s
doing with 2.5 million people a day visiting his website? What he does is he
sells advertising on his website.
Here are a couple of interesting facts just to wrap up this look at some
curation examples.
1. Many curated sites are at or near the top of Alexa rankings or worldwide
rankings, as we’ve seen with Matt Drudge.
2. Curation is accepted and well respected. Big sites are doing it and you can
do it too.
3. New tools like Wordpress themes and plugins, software that you can run
on your computer (whether you’re a Mac or a PC doesn’t matter) make
ethical curation easier than ever.
In the next module we’re going to get into how to curate content using those
exact tools. For now what I’m hoping you’re excited about is the big picture
sense of who is doing the curation. I hope these examples encourage you,
because they really encouraged me and I want to go out there and curate
more content because it’s just the easiest way to help people and to build
your own online presence.
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That’s a look at curation examples, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you have
an excellent day.
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