Wayfinding for the Web
How Super Creators — aka Curators — help us navigate the world
Super Creators — creators who have ascended to the status of Curators — are on the spear tip of a movement that's about finding new and direct ways of capturing value from the micro-economy that revolves around them. This series explores a few ways this landscape is changing.
Super Creators create more than just content. By publishing great content that resonates (via tweets, videos, newsletters, etc), Super Creators create a flurry of economic and cultural activity around them, and tend to curate an ecology of like-minded content, conversation, brands, and products that their followers resonate with, and can tap into. Super Creators, with a sizeable following, transform into Curators.
Today, Curators build relationships with their followers largely on social networks or publishing platforms, and monetize by collaborating with brands for sponsorships and platforms for a share of ad revenue. Curators come in many forms, including social media influencers (on Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube), independent brands, writers, tweetstorm-ers, moderators of subreddits, chat groups, and more.
They curate:
Content
Community
Conversation
Products & Brands
Values
... and more
The Curator Economy
Curators are wayfinders for a sprawling web. They discover, guide, and navigate their followers towards relevant digital content and goods that's hard to find just by SEO. However, as influential as these Curators are to their followers, they often don't see the financial benefits of their ecosystem in a direct way.
While brand sponsorships for social media influencers are growing every year (stats), along with subscription revenue for independent publishers, the lion's share of economic activity is in ads and the monetization of data, of which Curators see a mere fraction. Curators don't own their content, data, nor relationships with their followers — creating a lock-in effect for whichever platform they started on. Great for the social network, not so great for the Curator.
The landscape is fundamentally changing. Today, Curators publish and curate across platforms, often posting across different social media networks (TikTok && Instagram && more) or content types (newsletter && podcasts). A new "membership stack" with features like subscription CRMs, crypto "celebrity" tokens, and cloud-based retail supply chains are emerging. These new picks and shovels are the bedrock for Curators to build a much more symbiotic relationship with their followers, and in some instances, even grow together.
What fascinates me about the Curator Economy are the emergent business models that help Curators build a dynamic and independent micro-economy for Curators, their followers, and their ecosystem of content and products (and sometimes, other Curators). From tokenized membership stacks to on-demand micro stores, from private social networks to virtual gathering grounds, the Curator Economy is a movement accelerated by people wanting to design ways for creative, flexible, and authentic work.
A Deeper Dive In
Content and commerce have been strange bedfellows since the 1500s, when businesses caught on to the idea that they could pay the town crier to advertise for them as they made their rounds broadcasting the news. The next part of the series takes a deeper look at that intertwined relationship that's now supercharged by technology and behavioral leaps in streaming, shopping, and supply chains. Read on!