David Cummings on Startups

Thoughts on the Content Sourcing Marketplace Space

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David Cummings

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Almost two years ago I wrote a post on a Content Marketing as a Service idea where I talked about the need in the market for high quality custom content on a regular basis for companies. It’s been two years and I still haven’t seen anything breakthrough as a clear leader in the space.

Here are three content marketing companies that are related to the idea but not the exact thing:

  • Contently – marketplace that facilitates high quality freelancers for companies
  • Compendium – content marketing platform that provides a set of tools for content planning, managing, and publishing
  • Kapost – content marketing platform with a marketing calendar, workflow, analytics, etc

After thinking more about the idea and market for content marketing marketplaces, I believe there are some challenges in the space to build a $100 million business:

  • Content is too personal and custom to a business such that business owners and marketers are very reluctant to outsource it to a third party (this is anecdotal after asking several business owners about it)
  • Crowd sourcing areas in the creative space have been most successful with simple, visual items like logos where there are people that design logos for fun and it’s easy to decide which ones you do and don’t like. It’s exponentially more difficult on both sides of the equation to facilitate 1,000 word blog posts as the product.
  • Even if you outsourced the content development to a third party, it still takes a significant amount of effort to come up with content ideas and the subsequent editing of it to maintain a consistent voice and message aligned with your brand

Content marketing continues to grow in importance but I think there’s too much friction relative to the return on investment for a content marketing production as a service company to emerge as a large vendor. As it is now, it will continue being serviced by agencies, PR firms, and more involved freelancers.

What else? What are your thoughts on the content sourcing marketplace space?

Comments

4 responses to “Thoughts on the Content Sourcing Marketplace Space”

  1. Frank Moyer (@fwmoyer) Avatar
    Frank Moyer (@fwmoyer)

    Nice thought-provoking post. The “content is too personal and custom” point is an important one. I would feel much more comfortable forming a set of syndication relationships with content providers in my domain area and then paying a “content as a service” provider to augment and enhance that syndicated content in a way that is personalized to my business. Since it is simply enhancing trusted content, this may be a low-risk and inexpensive way to generate more high-value content (and that doesn’t get blocked by Panda). All original content for my business I would still prefer to be done in-house. And I would still want in-house people to review the content before it is posted.

    Reply
  2. Steven Wagner Avatar
    Steven Wagner

    One other option is copify.com. They have a roster of writers (professional and amateur). You pay per piece making it far more affordable and manageable.

    You can bulk upload a list of content needs for completion. We’ve used them to accelerate content.

    Reply
  3. Riftstalker Avatar
    Riftstalker

    Accelerate content is probably a buzz word that makes me feel sad for the end users of said content (got it?).

    Tolkien took 12+ years to write Lord of the Rings and didn’t decide halfway through the books to accelerate the content by sending a few chapters to freelancers.

    My point is content is too important in most cases.

    Reply
  4. Clayton Lainsbury Avatar
    Clayton Lainsbury

    Hi David, interesting post! A friend of mine from the VIATeC Accelerator (Victoria, BC) who follows your blog referred me here. I think you hit all the core issues here to scaling a crowdsourced content creation platform.

    I’m the founder of Crowd Content — a startup on a mission to do exactly what you’ve discussed in this article (not promoting, just mentioning for context). In my opinion, the fact that this is such a challenging venture is what makes the opportunity so attractive. Keyword = challenging, not impossible, meaning whoever gets there could see substantial success.

    I think the answer to most of the roadblocks you mentioned is improved communication and workflow management (also, high levels of standardization). Think back to your Organizational or Behavioral Management courses… many of the same principles apply to crowdsourcing, just on a much larger, and more virtual, scale, making it way more difficult to implement such principles effectively.

    The problem with many current solutions is that jobs are executed within silos and often are “one offs”. In other words, you have a single writer who fulfills an order for a client, but is then never seen again. On top of that, the next writer might not have any idea of what the first writer did for said client.

    We strongly feel that by creating a “tighter” network with higher levels of communication between client and writer, but also between writer and writer, we can improve the process and address the voice consistency issue along with many others. To me, the main objective here is to mimic the quality and proximity that you get from working directly with an agency or a “more involved freelance writer” while still offering the speed, convenience, price predictability, and reach/diversity/scalability that a platform stocked with thousands of high quality writers can provide.

    Again, I think you’re really on point with this post and I look forward any future ideas you publish around the topic.

    Thanks,
    Clayton

    Reply

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