Strictly Curating vs. Mostly Own Content

It depends on what you're going to do in order to create more value for the content you would curate. How are you going to present it? How are you going to set it up so that people get more from it versus going where the content is originally? Other than convenience what value are you going to bring? Answer these questions and this will help you understand which choice is better for you.

It might depend on how you market it. If you apply the rule of 20% time in content production and 80% time in promoting your content, I think you will be successful whether its your own content or curated. Most people think that putting out original content without putting in marketing efforts will automatically bring them traffic.
You rightly mentioned the curated sites that have made it big while other sites with original content are still struggling.
Whichever way, look for a means to take your content to the people and don't wait for them to come especially if it's curated content

Good point phoenix44,

I guess convenience and a connection of ideas and concepts to create a new perspective.

There's no rule against trying both as long as you give credit to the creator of the curated content. You might get an idea of what works best, but the art of SEO is an elusive skill. There are SEO professionals, of course, but what works on Google isn't necessarily a criterion for Yahoo and Bing and the parameters all have subtle shifts. If you are thinking of a Wordpress site then Yoast is a good plugin to help you along but, again, not all winds blow in the same direction.

Honestly, focus on your own content. This will be much more valuable in the long run.

Content Curation and Content Creation are very different approaches to generating content for a website.

But they both work, if well done.

I think you just answered you own question when you note the 100 million business over a content curation site. Could you get that price easily over your own content?

It depends. If you have a strong social media following you could send all your content there and you won't need to really on search engine traffic. But if it's your goal to rank content in the search engines... Yes, you would need original content.

Curated content and original content both have their positives and negatives. How you implement them will make a big difference ... and as others have said ... there's nothing stopping you from using both types of content.

ViralNova and the other wildly successful sites you mentioned are very much exceptions to the rule. There are thousands of these sites that make very little and die almost anonymously without a ripple in the market place. Don't count on being able to do as well on your first venture.

Personally, I agree with ChrisBa. I think original well-written and focused content that you own is more valuable than repeating what others have said and own. There is so much potential to re-purpose original content in many, many, profitable ways.

One of the keys, of course, is your own ability to write compelling copy. If you don't write well, or can't hire out your writing to a great writer, then neither of these approaches is a great fit for your skill set.

Steve

Always great insight Steve!

Both work, it's just "different" systems.

BoredPanda, LadBible, etc. - obviously are user-generated / curated and wouldn't work otherwise, if they were to make their own videos.

Gary Vee, Grant Cardone, Tai Lopez - they do all their original content and release it all the time.

It's just figuring out what it is you want to do. There's also nothing stopping you from doing both at the same time.

It comes down to one thing ... traffic. If you have a way of driving traffic that is not dependent upon search engines, curated content could work as well or maybe even better than trying to create your own content. There are tons of very big websites that subsist entirely on curated content (drudgereport.com comes immediately to mind).

That said, if you want to be ranked well in search engines (for anything but your own domain name), the only way to really do it is with your own content. In fact, Google's John Mueller very recently stated that if content is not unique and valuable, it may not be indexed at all by Google.

Yes curated content is OK. I'm currently building a forum with about 40% my stuff, 60% curated from other sources. I think it will work just great.

Yes, it's possible to make money running a website that are mostly curated videos, infographics, GIFs, slides, etc. However, you need to make sure that it has enough traffic and it has audience (real audience). Because no matter how good looking your site is, it's useless if no one is visiting. Just a friendly reminder though, please make sure you put the original link as a courtesy to the content creator.

Yes.

What are you going to do if the other site is down, or goes out of business, and your revenue now stops? You dont own the site, and that's problem #1.

It's like having an affair with a married woman. What will you do when she breaks it off from you and all the adult endeavors & seeing her stops? Most would say, "Well, just go find another woman (un-married) to be with."

Exactly. So do the same thing here.

Write YOUR OWN content and create different forms of content. You now own the intellectual property. If anybody else's site goes down... your site is still earning and you can chill and make money stress free - without constantly checking the status of the other site.

Of course you can make a ton of money with absolutely nothing but curated content. That's the whole business model for Google and every other search engine, after all.

So my view on this is as people mentioned above a 60-40 rule where you create your content but feature viral stuff that is within the niche to attract new viewers to sample your content. The websites you listed pay a lot of free lancers or interns to find things and write blurbs on them to "report" on the content to fit within fair use law of reporting or op-eds to avoid infringement. You see it a lot on yahoo where it's a 4 line write up and then a link to another website or the person has rewrote the article of the article. I don't know if a CNN RSS feed into say wordpress would cover the same thing as people would see it's from CNN for example but there are content companies like outbrain that pay sites to place branded content articles on websites, which everyone is familiar with. If you cite everything you post and make it clear it's not part of the larger income puzzle and simply "oh hey this is what I found" like in a news package for a news cast it's ok. A great example of this is reddit and google trends, where EVERYONE gets content of the day's top stories and content. If you truly look at the day's top content and news stories, it's about 30-50 new pieces of content distributed by everyone in one day all the way down to local newspapers, because no outlets have reasources. We just had the super bowl which was a huge event and the news cycle the next 48 hours after the game was 10-15 pieces of content pushed out everywhere from the ram truck commercials to kevin hart drunk etc. So if you create your own content and then your take on viral content that fits your niche it would be of value. There's no purpose to run a website if it's all content from other platforms. It's like how many tv networks run law and order reruns, it's that same issue.

kushmanmediallc,

Your point is well taken, and dead on.

I would like to add that curated content also includes original Youtube videos (e.g. fashion, science, history, etc..) infographics from all genres, and other visual content. So, the 'news' component can be left to the sites that you mentioned.

But, what you wrote does somewhat apply to what I'm referring to. That is, much of the curated content out there is being seen or has been seen by many people already.

Thanks for the perspective.

Technically, curating does play up your 'expert' status

After all, if you are an expert curator in your niche, you'd only collect the very best and most helpful materials.

If you can drive traffic, you can monetize a purely curated site

Curated content is not a bad thing as long as you have compiled all needed information that your market is looking for, you can really get good amount of traffic that converts.

The most important thing about curating content is doing it the right way. It's not just posting other people's content. You need to be able to add your take on the article or explain why you think it's important to your audience.

Here's a good article on the subject:

https://coschedule.com/blog/curate-content/

Rose

So true Rose, that's the most important connection. An example would be like say if you did a car blog/site and your writing your own take on a car or the car industry. Well you'll have to cite say motortrend or car and driver as there's no way around the fact that this is where you got your information from as a source as the industry's media camp is small. So you cite the article, maybe link to it, etc. in your opinion post about it. Think of it as instead of being a freelancer for them, your running your own site with articles to monetize better.

It then becomes a natural "washing of the hands" where all things become satisfied where you build up credibility citing the sources, and then in google search or seo you get the interest associated with source and content. So it's doing what everyone else does in terms of the process of write your content and cite the source to reference.

Then the hard part comes where you try to monetize: do I sell my articles, content, or do I do sponsored posts, ads etc.

I don't think there's anything wrong with citing content as curation as most websites and media outlets do it as there's no reasources to deliver original reporting 24/7. As long as you state your opinion on the content or your take than it's good, and your readers will come to you looking for your take. The social media platform Medium which focuses mostly on writing has mostly opinion pieces that cite for reference