Lee Odden CEO at Toprankblog interviewed 10 thought leaders on content marketing and curation. The article was published one year ago but is still really relevant, probably even more. I love the approach of Brian Solis who asks the good questions :

"Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re in business. I need to hear about that."

Curation offers the opportunity to settle this dialogue between a brand and its users, becoming always more engaging. It's not enough to be here, you have to be here to say. As says Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at @marketingprofs, "All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins."

"There’s a lot of talk about content curation; but is anyone making money?" asks Deanna Dahlsad on her blog. 

Though I can assure her we have plans to make some at Scoop.it (we've had premium offers from day 1 and they're ramping up very nicely), her focus is actually more on the curators themselves.

How can individual curators make money? She's not talking about brands or businesses who have an opportunity to get brand awareness or thought leadership out of this. She means the individuals who are willing to become professional curators and need to make some revenue  to justify it. Like some bloggers do. 

As I've outlined before, I think the answer will come from a mix of advertising (which can be promoted posts or sponsoring) and subscription revenue. This is not an original answer but we're starting to see some of our users do that:

- Check out http://hdslrnews.planet5d.com/ for an example of a sponsored topic;

- Some others want to be paid by their clients for their curation work and start to implement our privacy feature for that reason.

But maybe this picture needs to be looked at in a bigger way: in itself, blogging isn't either a massive revenue generation opportunity. There aren't that many blogging millionaires who make a fortune purely out of subscribing people to their blogs or selling ads on it. But most of the time, they're able to combine some direct revenue with offline or other services that their blogs help position and thus contribute to sell. 

Isn't combining that Content Marketing aspect of Curation with some direct revenue-generation the real winning bundle for Curators? What do you think?

This is an interesting workshop presentation given at #converge11 by Joyce Seitzinger. It has a focus on curation in EduTech but is generic as well in a lot of aspects.

In particular, I love the distinction she makes from slide 22 onward between all types of "curators": a fun way of showing what curation best practices should be all about.