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 these periodicals.

A curator could be a well-known figure who broad swaths of the general public are already familiar with and trust.  But they could just as well be the kind of person who simply shares lots of links with their friends and other social media contacts.

Of course, we couldn’t expect consumers to pay as much for being steered to a good article as to a good entire magazine.  But that doesn’t mean the curators’ efforts would go financially unrewarded.

Savvy publishers of online magazines would recognize that the readers a curator brings to one of their articles generates income from people who probably wouldn’t have encountered the piece in any other way. 

It would therefore be well worth the periodicals’ while to share, say, two cents out of the new dime revenue this produces with someone who’s out there beating the bushes on their behalf.

When a content owner opts into this arrangement, the payments would be handled by the same system that handles the readers’ dimes.

It’s important to note that the publishers would not pay curators just to recommend their content.  Instead, they’d pay only for the readers that are actually delivered.  

This means the publishers would always be paying out of revenue they’d already received—and only sharing a small portion of it.  What other form of advertising or promotion could offer such a can’t-lose deal? 

Additionally, this arrangement would ensure that the recommendations system remains maximally useful to readers, since curators who tout content indiscriminately would destroy their own credibility, and with it, their revenue stream.

Smart curators would also realize that to maximize their income, they should look for good online content in more places than just the websites of big-name existing publications.  For example, small literary or professional journals could be excellent hunting grounds.  So might individual writers’ blogs or other types of web pages.

The net effect of this form of curation would be to bring more high-quality content than ever before to the reading public, while at the same time enabling far more writers than ever to build followings and reputations, and finally make a decent amount of money from the most meaningful work they’ll ever do.

Strong positive effects are also likely to be felt among a writer’s friends and acquaintances.  Just knowing a person like themselves who has been accepted into the larger conversations of the day can substantially diminish their own sense of being excluded.

This is exactly the kind of structural change—giving Davids a reasonable chance to compete with Goliaths—that a world currently suffering under the crush of a toxic gigantism of scale needs in order to grow healthier.

A similar model of content curation, marketing, and distribution could also be applied to more than just our reading material—and yield comparably positive results.