Curation wars and the battle for attention
Digital curators are trending toward higher-quality and more personalized content to maintain captive audiences
In an excellent summary published on REDEF yesterday, Tal Shachar examines the rise of the “Influencer Curator” — people who will act as the new point of distribution between content creators and audiences. He describes:
Today’s curators are influential because they have relationships with audiences. They’re hired by fans because of their taste, not hired by executives to satiate the appetites of fans. This, when combined with frictionless commerce and fan engagement channels, can also make these influencers far more wide-reaching and multi-vertical than even the Oprahs and Martha Stewarts of the past. As such, their influence in taste making is an inversion of the classic model, not merely the replacement of old tastemakers with new.
If in the future, perhaps these individuals will hold distribution power. But, where does the power lie today?
The challenge in cutting through today’s abundance of content is that there are numerous platforms trying to feed the consumer what they want at any given point in time. At the broadest level, these platforms are simply aggregator-distributors which differ on the types of content aggregated and the delivery mechanism used
Below is a simple categorization of many of the leading media aggregator-distributors, based on quality of content (user-generated aka UGC vs. premium) and curation strategy (aggregate vs. personalized).
The overall trend appears to be a move up and to the right — towards high quality, personalized content. Take the social networks, for example, all of which offer a highly personalized service based on free content uploaded by the user. In order to capture more of the consumer’s time (and money), these networks are trying to introduce more premium and often branded content in the form of LinkedIn Pulse, Snapchat Stories, Instagram Sponsored Listings, and Facebook Instant Articles. Moreover, examine UGC-champion Snapchat who recently inked their final major label deal with Universal Music Group to secure rights to add more premium content. Finally, consider YouTube where the successful growth of several MCNs indicates a push towards both more premium content in a more curated fashion.
Even those who are already highly regarded for their personalization capabilities strive for continuous improvement. For example, Netflix is constantly testing and evolving each user’s home screen to increase the chance of finding a well-suited recommendation. As Variety reports:
As part of these efforts, the company [Netflix] has also been exploring ways to respond to timing and context. The assumption: You just don’t watch the same things while eating breakfast as during a Saturday movie night.
To test this assumption, Netflix sliced up the day of some of its subscribers into half-hour chunks, analyzing their viewing behavior during each of those small time slots and trying to serve them relevant recommendations based on that behavior.
Turns out this test did not yield significant results, but Netflix continues to run hundreds of tests each year in order to optimize the user experience to each consumer.
As these aggregator-distributor platforms fight for consumer’s attention by offering an experience tailored more specifically to each user’s unique interests and context, it remains to be seen who will win the battle. Will it be individual influencers, as Shachar’s article suggests? Or will there be a winner-take-all platform with the data and scale to make the perfect recommendation time and time again?
The answer hinges on what you believe about consumer’s preferences. Do people identify more with a particular voice and style along the lines of celebrity influencers? Do they have truly unique preferences? Do they simply want to read, watch, and listen to the same thing as all of their friends? More thoughts on that in the next post.
Questions? Comments? What do you think? Leave me a note below!
Libby Koerbel loves to analyze ambiguous questions, listen to live music, and meet new people. She is an expert strategist with experience at the Boston Consulting Group, Pandora, Universal Music Group, Muzooka, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. She is currently a MBA student at the Kellogg School of Management.
