Everyone is curating, and everyone loves food
So many products are now evolving to the point of expanding beyond merely providing content…they’re curating the content with their own voice, tone and style. They’re doing so because they know the barriers between someone engaging with one experience or another depend on how easily they fit and augment into their lives. The less effort, the easier an experience is to adopt.
Airbnb
In terms of Airbnb the content isn’t just the listing of a home, its where you’re actually going. And if you’re not familiar with where it is you’re going, By expanding into experiences, its allowing users to forego a few steps in the trip planning process – presenting a range of activities depending on your interest. This is a prime example of contextualizing content, for things a person might be interested in – and also new experiences they may discover along the way.
Spotify
Spotify has set an industry standard in terms of how they package music discovery. Having working at a competing music service, one thing I noticed was clear – whereas in some experiences discovery was something that was serendipitously presented along the way – Spotify presents it as a “gift” of sorts. And the gifts are presented to you on various time scales, daily, weekly, and ultimately their “year in review” product. This is another indicator that content curation plays an important role of accessing the familiar and discoverable.
Medium
For years Medium has allowed people to share their thoughts in a more structured, editorialized way than the standard blog post. What was missing was a way to easily navigate through various articles, think pieces and topics. Their first foray into “Collections” not only provides a value proposition for their subscription service, it makes it far easier to read and discover content on their platform.