Content Creation v. Content Curation

To create or to curate – that is the question.

During Internet Week, Ryan Lawler from New TeeVee and Magnify’s CEO Steve Rosenbaum explored this topic. I attended the talk, thinking it would be a debate between creation and curation. I was wrong – from the very beginning, it was announced that “Curation is King.” Rosenbaum cited New York Magazine as a great example – on average, for every 10 videos on their site, they produce three and the remaining seven are curated from other blogs and sites.

There has been much buzz and commentary on the curation issue. Most recently, Mediabistro reported that Forbes.com will “open its doors to thousands of unpaid contributors and that [rather than commissioning in-house journalism] ‘Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent.’” According to Tech Crunch’s Paul Carr, this makes “quality, originality and exclusivity … fast becoming irrelevant. Instead, online publications increasingly treat content as low-paid, illiterate swill, commissioned by the ton to provide SEO ad inventory.”

Regardless of your point of view, the bottom line is that there is a massive appetite for online content and sites need to stay relevant by consistently posting new (and strong) material on a daily basis. Given this demand, it is no longer feasible to simply create. The question here is how sites plan on doing this in the long run, which inevitably leads us to more questions: Are these assets monetized? If anyone generates revenue, should it be the content creator, the site that curates and hosts content, or both?

It will be interesting to follow the Forbes.com story as well as other similar developments in the digital space. What are your thoughts on curation? Share them with us here.

Update: Steve Rosenbaum recently posted his thoughts on curation in Business Insider.