Once they’re used to having entities they trust take them to highly-quality online magazines, people will be ready to have reliable curators similarly guide them to specific articles within periodicals. These people would make money by adding critical human judgment to the task of finding good online content.
Here’s how the process could work:
Picture yourself as a curator going by the name WebMaven. You’d discover noteworthy content somewhere in the vast reaches of the web, and then go to a new online content discovery service associated with DimeContent.
Here, you’d log in, choose an appropriate topic or category of content, and paste in the URL of your latest find. This action would make the item available to consumer-users of the discovery service..
Later, someone using the consumer-facing side of the service might choose to see content matching the category you applied to your discovery. Your name would be included in a list of curators who had made recommendations on this topic. If the user clicked on WebMaven to focus only on items you’d recommended, then chose to spend a dime to read one of these, you’d be paid the largest share of that recommendation money.
On the other hand, the consumer might choose to go directly to the full list of content items within a category (i.e., without specifying any curator). In this case, if he chose to read the item you recommended, his dime would be spread among all the curators who recommended this item in the specified category.
In both cases, algorithms would ensure that the revenue was shared in a fair and equitable way. This would include provisions to penalize curators from indiscriminately recommending content they don’t genuinely believe the public will like.
Who would perform a curation function? In the beginning, it would most likely be people who already share a lot of links to interesting content via social media, and would like to make some money from their efforts.
As time went by, bloggers and podcasters would probably be next to get in on the action. When they, too, made money, increasingly well-known people would become participants, deriving additional revenue from their celebrity.
