network-stories/pages/The Content Marketplace.md

• This document attempts to outline the players in what I'm calling the Content Marketplace. That is the landscape of content, its consumers, its curators, and all the technology that is used to store/discover/serve this content and value exchange between the players. I'm sure this term has been used, I'm sure that all of the things in here have been said. It's main to put much of what is needed to discuss the 3-sided Content Marketplace later.

The content creator's situation

• The current content market seems to be broken. Let's explore.
• A content creator, if needing to be self sustainable, needs to do a few things
  • capture the attention of an audience.
  • make revenue from that attention.
• The content creator seems to have a few ways in which they can monetize attention.
  • they can leverage the attention by serving advertisements from folks that think their products have a meaningful overlap with the interests of those giving their attention.
  • they can gate the access to the content being created
  • they can sell the content being created

The consumer's situation

• The consumer has a limited amount of attention they can spend on things. They must choose from the infinite material out there to consume. It is their goal to maximize the efficiency of this process such that they care about what they spend their time on.
• The internet grows at a pace that is intractible to keep up to date with. The barrier of entry is practically none existent at this point
• The consumer must know where to go to get content, and will use a place based on a few factors:
  • availability of content
  • ease of navigating to content desired
  • ease of consuming desired content
  • cost of access
  • discovery of new content

The curator's situation

• and that place will have to use some sort of process to organizating and serving content to them.
• The curator must choose content from the vast amount of current and new material, grade it, and prioritize it.
• a curator is a sifting mechanism of content. The finished product will always be biased by the subjective evaluations of the perspective of the curator.
• A curator experiences success when content consumers appreciate that bias and leverage them for the content consumption and discovery process.
• A curator can leverage algorithmic processes to automatically score material based on a myriad of weighted metrics. The weights and metrics are the bias of the curator, and are amplified in the finalized content the moment the algorithm classifies more content than the curator could do by hand (and the amount of time spent on the algorithm, metrics, and weights)
• In order to be successful, a curator must understand their audience and subsequently what is perceived as "good" and "bad" such that they can maintain engagement.