The rising importance of the Curator

What if you’re not an artist?

If we look to the art world there is another extremely important role that must be fulfilled (and not necessarily by an artist):

That of Curator.

We are time poor individuals living in an sea of abundant online content.

Primary value to us comes directly from Businesses who are Artists.

Secondary value comes from trusted advisors, Curators, who can point us to Businesses who are Artists.

The wrong way to curate is to game the system with a formula. In time such tactics will be filtered out by the algorithms – as Facebook did in August 2014 destroying such curators like Buzzfeed and Viralnova overnight.

Even ‘successful’ curator retailers like Asos and The Iconic are in danger. Sure they curate what’s fashionable to the masses, but once I’ve decided on an item, its not rocket science to then google that specific item and find a cheaper supplier somewhere else.

The other wrong way to do curation is to involve yourself in a global race to the bottom.

Curators involved in a race to the top include Bloggers who are passionate about their field: Lucy Feagins is a curator, Dumbo Feather is a curator. Tim Ferriss once author, is also now a Curator.

One left-field curator whose work comes up again and again is Unsplash (by Montreal digital agency, Crew). Each week, Unsplash curate 10 beautiful and completely royalty free, attribution free, license free photographs – no doubt you’ve seen these photos proliferate on the web for all these reasons. Unsplash provides massive value in and of itself *and* is a very clever, permission marketed, lead generation funnel for Crew.

And on an even bigger scale, most social media platforms are also Curators: Facebook is a curator. So is Pinterest. So is Spotify. And now, so is YouTube.

What’s the common understanding that all of these Connection Economy Curators have about Curation?

Curators are also artists.

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