"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?

Via Deanna Dahlsad