Curation 3.0 is Here
In an ideal world, expert curators help consumers make key decisions, including which products and services to buy, which places to visit, and how to lead a healthy lifestyle. The curators are responsible for researching and documenting a variety of options and for sifting between the reputable, valuable, and worthwhile on the one hand and the costly, inefficient, and untrustworthy on the other. Consumers rely on this data when they make purchasing decisions.
Outside this ideal world, however, the optimal relationship between curator and consumer often breaks down, especially when the consumer is forced to leave a curator’s website and travel to a retailer to complete a purchase. When this occurs, a shift takes place: the curator becomes disempowered and the consumer experience disconnected as the retailer takes on greater responsibility and enjoys enhanced benefit (despite having done little to earn such benefit from the consumer).
Welcome to the world of Curation 2.0, where Big Tech aggregators of information rule. Curators are disempowered because they can’t earn true value from their work: they can’t make money from a transaction unless they’re using affiliate marketing on their own website or app, which — besides the fact that it doesn’t always pay well — can be deceptive to the consumer. Affiliate links are advertising dollars for the retailer, with the disclosure (such as compensation) obscured. Thus, the reader doesn’t necessarily know the incentives behind the link.
At this level of curation, the Internet is polluted with reviews that are often questionable, lacking credibility, and even outright outlandish. The proliferation of fake reviews diminishes the value of the real reviews and, in turn, quality curators are filtered out. This causes a seismic shift in the way consumers think about brands and purchasing habits, influencing us to think in accordance with Curation 2.0 ideology.
Fake reviews hurt almost everyone in the value chain: authentic reviewers are drowned, consumers can’t find the truth (purchasing the wrong goods and services), and although some deceptive businesses are doing well, honest businesses are stuck because their products are not hitting the marketplace.
The honest curators, whether they’re a magazine, an influencer, a blogger, or a reviewer, are finding it difficult to express their contribution. During the first evolution of curation (what we call Curation 1.0 or Word-of-Mouth), a recommendation to a restaurant, for example, might have earned them an acknowledgment of doing a good deed from a reader. But mere acknowledgment isn’t sufficient anymore — not if the curator wants to have a sustainable ecosystem which supports their work.
Within Curation 2.0, the curators are undervalued because they give their content away for free (unless the brand is paying or they’re using affiliate marketing as discussed above). This is ironic, since on the Internet, curators do all of the heavy-lifting. They find the right content for their audience and set standards of information instead of polluting the Internet. All too often the only reward they earn is appreciation from their followers and readers, who themselves have difficulty attributing credit or revenue to the curator in the current system. In the end, they are unwitting volunteers for Big Tech.
Curation 2.0 not only limits the amount of quality curators and information, but also corrodes the consumer’s decision-making ability in-and-of-itself. It depletes our intellectual capacities in the long run, so that we don’t even know how to establish legitimacy in the first place.
Solutions
What is the solution to Internet pollution? How do we empower curators to clean it up?
We’re proposing a new model of curation, Curation 3.0, which builds better content all over the ecosystem by disclosing curators’ legitimacy, retaining traffic instead of directing traffic to other sites, and giving transparency and accountability to curators regarding their revenue.
With 1o, curators can own property they publish, retain their power, monetize their trust, stay accountable to consumers, and build an authentic following.
This is an improved curation model that drives better reviews, which are untainted because brands or other influences, such as advertising, are not part of the motivation. And when the content becomes real, so does the transaction.
1o merges the power of universal secure checkouts and content to set a new standard for Internet transactions of the future. With our frictionless same-page solutions, the curator will no longer be the powerless middleman directing traffic away to the retailers; they will retain the best prices and terms with the audience they already have.
Content and shopping now converge on a curator’s property, unlike Instagram or YouTube, where audiences have to exit to become consumers. With 1o capabilities, influence becomes an invitation to stay and shop, not leave and shop.
With our ability to allow consumers to purchase directly from an app/site/page, content can once again become king and true revenue can be fairly distributed among those who work hard and deserve to be part of the value chain.
Learn more about 1o here.
