Our friend Lee Odden offered some cold reality last summer, when he observed, “Many businesses are hard pressed to come up with original articles, blog posts, videos, images, presentations, etc on a regular basis.” Is this you?

Creating and distributing original content isn’t easy. It requires quite a bit of funding—to define business objectives and target audience, develop strategic insights, inspire compelling creative and ultimately produce work people actually notice. It also takes a lot of time.

Curation offers a distinct alternative in this paradigm.

Curating the world’s content—to uncover and celebrate ideas and insights in tune with your brand—can serve as a welcome balance to the costs involved in developing original content.

The strategic work still matters. In other words, you still need insights and direction to guide brand leadership, to guide curation. But the time and funding required to curate content can be significantly less than that spent creating original content. Of course, the balance depends on the subject matter your brand lives within—and the volume of existing content those topics generate.

We’re interested to see how brands evolve the ratio of their content in the age of empowered consumers, and suspect curation will supply an increasing share of that output.